It’s been two years since we lost the option of V6 power in the Toyota Camry, and the midsize sedan world is worse-off for it. Sure, it wasn’t the most efficient engine option, but it was smooth and powerful and weirdly nostalgic. These days, you can’t get a V6 in any regular retail-brand midsize sedan, but someone at Toyota clearly has a yearning for more than mere inline-four power. The marque’s just churned out a one-off Camry with seven cylinders. Yep, seven.
In this world, there are engine configurations that make sense. A straight-six has perfect primary and secondary balance, giving it the inherent smoothness of hot butter on toast. On a similar note, a cross-plane 90-degree V8 has evenly-spaced crank journals that add up to 360 degrees and a combustion event for every 90 degrees of crankshaft rotation, but primary balance is sorted out using crankshaft counterweights. Fortunately, these crankshafts are generally short enough to be fine at moderate-to-high rotational speeds, so they don’t go all wobbly when tasked with passenger car duty.
However, a seven-cylinder engine has its pitfalls. For one, the uneven firing order means you’re going to get some fore-aft rocking. Likewise, if you want to have evenly-spaced crank throws, dividing 360 degrees of rotation by seven results in a figure of 51.42857143. Not the easiest interval to make crank journals at. Oh, and then you get the sheer length of the thing. Because the crankshaft is usually rather long and you have these imbalances going on, seven-cylinder engines don’t like to rev very high at all. That’s why they’re generally used in things like diesel submarines and farming equipment.
It turns out Toyota avoided this problem by not using a seven-cylinder engine. Instead, a YouTube video shows that the Camry Gazoo Racing concept gets the 300-horsepower 1.6-liter turbocharged inline-three from a GR Corolla up front and a two-liter turbocharged four-cylinder engine where you’d expect to find rear seats. Officially called the G20, this four-banger’s expected to produce around 400 horsepower. Add it all up and you get nearly-Hellcat horsepower and all-wheel-drive in a Camry with seven cylinders and two transmissions. Is it less mad than an inline-seven? Slightly, but any car with two engines is properly out there.
So why do this? It’s Toyota’s way of announcing that the Camry is back on sale in Japan. While the midsize sedan remains popular in America, Toyota pulled the plug on it in Japan three years ago because—as Car And Driver reported—local sales in 2022 totalled roughly 6,000 units. That’s it. As such, Toyota still makes Camry sedans in Aichi, just not for domestic sale. For a couple of years, the Camry appeared to have reached the end of the road in Japan, until a trade war happened. With the current U.S. administration kvetching about American-made cars not being sold in Japan, Toyota decided upon two notable reverse-imports. The first is the full-size Tundra pickup truck. Try parking that in Tokyo. The second is the Camry, built in Kentucky for Japan. On the surface, it mostly seems like a savvy trade play, but that hasn’t stopped Toyota from doing two cool things with it.
That’s right, there’s a second Camry concept and it’s possibly even wilder than the twin-engined car. Instead of drawing from contemporary tuner culture, Daihatsu and Toyota Racing took a page from the past and went full kaido racer. In a way, finding modified Camry inspiration in ’70s family cars dressed up as exaggerated super silhouette racers is rather respectful.
However, this midsizer doesn’t just stop at a cartoonish sharknose, a splitter the size of a dining room table, and pipes that point to the sky. It also gets the engine from a GR Yaris and, as this YouTube video from nenkatsu shows, a gear knob that’s full of what looks like whiskey. No comment.
Needless to say, we aren’t going to see production Camrys like this anytime soon, but it’s nice to know that Toyota can still go completely, utterly “Here’s Johnny!” bonkers. If a smidgen of this insanity makes it to the long-rumored Celica and MR2, they’d be very entertaining indeed.
Top graphic image: YouTube/Nikolai Aksenov
Cmon Toyota. Bring back Japanese bubble economy madness in cars again.
And they didn’t just install two of the GR three cylinders for what reason???
Looks like for another 100hp
Now, take it to Pikes Peak and bring Tajima to race it.
Usually when something has 7 cylinders, it flies in a more literal sense than this thing probably does. And it’s a radial engine. Or maybe a rotary piston engine if if it’s really old.
That said, I do often enjoy Toyota’s unhinged Camry concepts, and this sure is that!
You need think radially. They are always odd numbers of cylinders for *scientific reasons*.
For the curious: most are 4-stroke, so every other piston fires: 1-3-5-7-2-4-6. An even number would end up skipping half the cylinders (even number radial engines are multi-row, eg, a 14 cylinder is 2 rows of 7). A 2-stroke radial could have an even number and the Monaco Trossi did this with a weird 16-cylinder in an 8-cylinder layout with the rear row in synch and sharing a combustion chamber. I’m sure there are others, but I don’t know of any other 2-stroke radials.
I’m never sure whether to count common crankpin V-twins as ‘radial’; or those weird “twingle” engines where one piston is a pre-compressor for the other, but they do have a common connecting rod.
I was hoping radial engine here
I thought they were going to count the brake master cylinder.
A GR Camry wagon would be the ultimate dad-mobile. Dear Toyota, you should make one.
With three wipers on the back.
One million percent!