2020 Toyota Camry AWD First Drive: Home Grown

If you want something done, do it yourself. Toyota’s North American team lived this truism after begging and pleading for an AWD variant of the Camry during the current (eighth-gen) Camry’s gestation. When Japan said bangō, the engineers and product planners on this side of the pond immediately ginned up a business case and set about retrofitting the Dynamic Torque Control AWD system from TNGA-platform sibling RAV4 into the sedan’s underbody to create the 2020 Toyota Camry AWD (as well as the 2021 Avalon AWD). Now that we’ve examined the engineering details of that operation, let’s climb in and see what adding 165 pounds of traction-enhancing hardware does to the four-cylinder Camry.

First, the AWD transplant brought with it all of the RAV4’s gearing, which pencils out to about 12 percent shorter than that of the front-drive four-banger Camry. This brightens acceleration a bit and reduces the sensation that a 165-pound friend has permanently joined you. Of course, a slightly more restrictive exhaust also shaves off a horsepower and lb-ft of torque or two, but our seat-of-the-pants assessment is that the Camry AWD will only lag the front-drive car by a couple tenths of a second or so to 60 mph. Let’s call it just under eight seconds.

On dry pavement, the system never makes itself known at all. As in the RAV4, an electromagnetic clutch decouples the rear axle when it’s not needed and can then send up to 50 percent of the total available torque rearward as necessary. It always engages when launching and typically remains engaged until 15 mph, but the locking and unlocking of this clutch is undetectable from inside the car. There is also no “AWD lock” button because offering such a button would require a certain percentage of the EPA test cycle to be run in a locked condition, which would further degrade fuel economy.

Speaking of which, the fuel economy ratings for all Camry AWD models are 25 mpg in the city and 34 mpg on the highway. The XLE and XSE models offer a drive mode switch, which demands some of the testing be done in Sport mode, dropping the combined rating from the LE/SE’s 29 mpg to 28. For reference, the front-drive ratings for LE/SE are 28/39/32 mpg city/highway/combined and for the XLE/XSE are 27/38/31 mpg.

In order to ensure we could feel the AWD system working, Toyota invited us to the Wasatch Mountains of Utah and set up sort of a snow autocross course at the Soldier Hollow Nordic Center, where many events of the 2002 Winter Olympics were staged.

The traction advantage was immediately apparent. (Note that AWD variants get the exact same all-season tires as their front-drive counterparts.) But what took us many fun laps of slipping and sliding to determine for sure was that the traction and stability controls were programmed in such a way as to permit a bit more controlled drifting than one might expect from a Toyota; I’m thanking fun-loving calibration engineers based in Michigan for that. This is, however, still a Toyota, so traction control can be turned off, but stability control is forever.

Enter a broad, snowy curve at just the right speed to allow a savvy lift off the accelerator that loads the nose just as you ease the steering wheel into the turn, and the whole car will gently slide around the turn and achieve the yaw rate the steering input ordered. Turn the wheel aggressively or hit the brakes, and the nannies swoop in like ruler-wielding middle-school nuns. It should be noted that the above drifting was as easily achieved with traction control switched on or off. MotorTrend enthusiasts will wish stability could be switched completely off, but their family and neighbors are probably safer as is.

Note that despite that Dynamic Torque Control moniker, the rear end never helps steer the car via left-to-right torque vectoring with this setup. The rear differential always remains open with the brakes reining in any errant wheelspin. But who knows? If AWD proves more popular than Toyota expects (15 percent of Camry production—or more than double the 6 percent V-6 take rate), maybe a future TRD AWD model can adopt the Dynamic Torque Vectoring AWD system found on the RAV4’s TRD Off-Road, Adventure, and Limited grades. It should bolt right in.

Our dry pavement run up to Robert Redford’s Sundance resort revealed little or no perceptible difference in handling. We could pretend to have detected an ever-so-slight increase in rear roll and/or grip thanks to the AWD models’ 22.2mm tubular rear anti-roll bar—down from 25.0–25.4mm on front-drive models. (All AWD models get the 25.4mm front bar from the XLE/XSE.) Be dubious of anyone claiming to detect this without using sensitive test gear, though. The rear suspension and carrier are 100 percent RAV4, and new springs elevate the car 0.2 inch to preserve ground clearance to the slightly lower-hanging exhaust, but everything is tuned to mimic the Camrys we all know and love.

The only other mid-cycle change coming to the Camry is the availability of a new Cold Weather package, which adds whichever of the following is not already standard on each trim grade: heated seats, heated steering wheel, and heated mirrors; pricing will vary by grade.

All-wheel drive is being marketed as a stand-alone option priced at $1,500. Production starts in March for deliveries soon after. The race is on to see if we can gather this new Camry with its existing competitors—the Nissan Altima AWD and Subaru Legacy—before the snow recedes from Michigan. Stay tuned.

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Source: WORLD NEWS