Toyota's American Statement

2005 Toyota Avalon Touring sedan

The 2005 Avalon Touring sedan is the best Buick Toyota Motor Corp. ever made.

That is a compliment to Toyota and the Buick Division of General Motors Corp.

For generations, Buick has been the purveyor of the quintessential American car -- big, powerful, comfortable, and luxurious within the bounds of modesty. It has been a conservative car -- perfect for small-business owners, government officials, clerics and others who want to make an impression without giving offense.

Perhaps, that is why Buick is so popular in the People's Republic of China, where it often appears as the Regal or the even more elegant Royaum (sounds like "realm" the way it's pronounced in Shanghai), dressed in black. The car bespeaks seriousness, stability, pride tempered by humility, achievement.

There is something universal in those virtues, something that transcends boundaries and commands the same kind of intense loyalty among Buick owners in China as it does among those in the United States. That might seem odd to Americans who are fond of disparaging Buick as a seller of fuddy-duddy automobiles. But spend time with the devout owners of Buick LeSabre cars in Raleigh, N.C., or watch the smile on the face of a Shanghai citizen as he talks about his sparkling new Buick Regal, and you get the picture.

Toyota certainly gets it, which it why it begot the completely revised Toyota Avalon for 2005. "The all-new Avalon is distinctive, stylish and the most American vehicle of any Toyota product to date," said Don Esmond, senior vice president and general manager of the Toyota Division in the United States.

Think about that. Esmond is a top executive of a car company that succeeded in America by being everything that U.S. car companies were not in the 1970s through much of the 1990s. Toyota made small, tight, fuel-efficient cars. It didn't make highway yachts like Buick.

But a market is a market and a dollar is a dollar, and whenever there is a market composed of the kind of loyalists who buy Buick automobiles in the United States and China, Toyota is interested. The trick is to out-Buick Buick, and that is exactly what Toyota has set out to do with the tested Avalon Touring sedan and its siblings, the Avalon XL, XLS and Limited.

The new Avalon is Buick big. Five long-legged adults can sit in the car comfortably. For the driver and front-seat occupant, there are no legs knocking against the center console. Rear passengers, including the one in the middle, can rest their feet on a flat floor. Headroom is good; and there is no unwanted elbow rubbing in the Avalon.

Toyota reworked the car's interior, notably the instrument panel, to give it more of a sweeping, open feel. It's a gamble. Toyota is betting that the mostly older drivers who are attracted to the Avalon don't want the tight, fighter-jet cockpit architecture of an instrument panel in a BMW 5 Series car or some other high-performance automobile. Instead, older drivers want their space, Toyota believes, and it attempts to give it to them with an instrument panel that is low, wide, undulating -- reminiscent of gentle sand dunes against the horizon.

You'd think that a car as big as a classic Buick would handle like one -- dipping into curves, swaying around corners, and cruising along the highway in the nautical sense of the term. But that isn't the case here.

The tested Avalon Touring comes with several suspension upgrades and 17-inch-diameter tires/wheels, the combination of which yields a very controlled, sports-car type ride. This was a joyful discovery, inasmuch as I fully expected the car to tilt and wiggle in the manner of big American sedans of old.

Acceleration brought smiles, too! The new Avalon runs with a 3.5-liter, 280-horsepower V-6 engine. That's 33 percent more peak horsepower than what was available in the previous model.

Delivery of that power in the Avalon, a front-wheel-drive car, is consistently smooth -- maybe too smooth for some tastes. The exhaust note, the sound emanating from the tailpipe during acceleration, is muted. There is no manly growling noise. There's just a low-keyed whoo-whoo-whoosh -- enough to let you know the engine is working, but isn't making a big deal of doing what it is supposed to do. Whoo-whoo-whoosh! It's pleasant, conservative, purposeful -- in keeping with "the most American vehicle," the best Buick Toyota ever made.