Comments by "Tony Sterbenc" (@tonysterbenc) on "" video.

  1. I suspect the only reason the Avalon was kept around in the first place was to give Toyota dealers a move-up option to keep older well-heeled Camry owners in the family. Once Toyota hit it with the ugly stick in '19, it wasn't getting that job done anymore.
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  2. The good news is that it'll be a killer used car buy for years to come, partly for one reason it's always been: Its old and conservative first owners never beat on it.
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  3. Except it turns out it doesn't have more space. It's just tall.
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  4. Nope. Didn't. Many other models went through the same chip shortages and yet were not discontiued.
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  5. Bingo. This is why the renamed Avalon, the Crown, is silly tall.
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  6. Bad guess. The US Crown is just one of four "Crown" models sold internationally, and it's not the major one abroad (that one is the much better GS successor). Importing the Harrier to the US under another name is nothing new; the former Harrier came here as the RX. Better guess: Avalon lost its audience to SUVs whose empty-nester buyers liked an SUV's commanding driving position and high easy entry/exit, so they reconstituted and renamed it as a tall sedan figuring they had nothing to lose.
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  7. Let me help: Because it didn't sell.
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  8. And now Maxima, 300 and Charger will follow Avalon to the grave. Among non-luxury badges, I'm not aware of any surviving sedan bigger than the Accord, and incredibly it too is marked for death in 4 years.
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  9. Among other things, let this be a lesson to you to go to independent mechanics for your oil changes. The Toyota dealer is gouging Lexus owners.
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  10. I think you're absolutely right. Here's the tell: It's well known that a car gets a bump in sales after a restyle. In 2013, the new Avalon was pretty, and sales jumped. In 2019, it was so damn ugly that sales went DOWN from the final year of its predecessor, despite functional upgrades. I personally was in the market in '21 and wanted to like the Avalon, but I just couldn't get past the combination of the catfish grille and the misshapen rear quarter window lines, and I stretched to an ES partly just to avoid the abomination the Avalon had become. Too bad its successor the Crown might be even uglier. It'll flop, too.
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  11. I predict that the Crown's sales will prove that sedans are dead, from non-luxury badges at least.
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