2025 Toyota Camry Ascent review

For the best part of its existence, Camry was a synonym for 'bland, dependable motoring'. Nobody who owned a Camry complained about unreliability, stuff breaking, or any manner of ownership issues. You put fuel and people and stuff in it, and it would go and go and go. Proper Toyota core values.

The problem was, particularly here in Australia, other brands either went premium or owners got far enough up the ladder to buy premium and found out what it was like to own or drive a car that cornered well, felt connected to the road, and could at least put a smile on your face.

This new Camry isn’t all-new, but a decent facelift on the car that arrived here some years ago. As buyers also flocked to SUVs, the Camry found a new market in the often punishing world of ride share and taxi applications, delivering the kind of cheap-to-own-and-run thrills a low-margin businessperson needs while delivering an attractive form factor.

But two seconds at the wheel of this car and you know a lot has changed, even if just a little.

At just under 40 large before on-roads, this is an unexpected volume of vehicle for your money. The Ascent is the entry-level starter Camry, arriving on your drive with 17-inch alloys, auto LED headlights, keyless entry and start, fabric seats, power-folding mirrors, dual-zone climate control, power windows, an 8.0-inch touchscreen, satellite navigation, around-view cameras, reversing camera and a spare tyre.

If you were to pay another $3000 to get to the Ascent Sport, you’d be getting a bigger screen, powered driver’s seat, improved headlights and a wireless phone charger. I’m gonna say that’s a tough call, because none of that stuff is hyper-important but all of it is useful. There’s then an $11,000 gap to the SL, which is squarely for private buyers rather than fleets and ride-share folk.

A decade ago the Camry had plenty of rivals, but we’re down to less than a handful now. You’ve got Hyundai’s 60-grand Sonata, Honda’s $65,000 Accord Hybrid, and down at the cheaper end, you can start with a bog-spec but resolutely not-hybrid Mazda 6 from around $36,000.

Apart from premium paint, there are no factory options. Toyota dealers have a ton of accessories from the naff to the useful, so you can knock yourself out there.

MORE: 2025 Toyota Camry price and specifications

Let’s start with a figure that will no doubt be of great interest to the legion of folks who will be using this car to carry people about. The Camry’s boot is a hefty 524 litres. What’s more they’re easily accessible litres, with a nice wide opening boot lid and a pretty broad and low loading lip.

When I came to load it up with a bunch of flattened boxes, I did notice that with the seat down (no volume offered by Toyota) that the aperture into the cabin is quite narrow. It’s a fairly niche observation, but if that’s something you need to check, you know you need to now.

Given the car is 4920mm long – 35mm up on the old – you’d expect a roomy interior and that’s what you get. The rear seats are comfortable without being spongy or too soft. The fabric throughout is quite nice, and I prefer it to fake leather for lots of childhood Datsun 200B-related reasons. There’s plenty of head, leg, knee and foot room, and you could put three across in a pinch.

Weirdly, the rear door changed shape between generations for styling reasons, so watch your head getting in if you’re used to the old one.

Rear-seat dwellers score two USB-C ports and air-con vents, a pair of cupholders in the armrest and door pockets.

Up front you have a pair of front seats that look great, again even with the fabric. Vision out is excellent, with big windows and a good wide windscreen. I really liked the driving position, but absolutely did not like the plastic steering wheel. For just a few extra bucks, Toyota could have fixed both that and the shifter, but here we are. Just feels really cheap.

The seats are reasonably supportive, but a four-hour round trip did give my wife and me a bit of a numb bum. I think the seats are a tad too spongy and lacking in lumbar support, so I’m curious if others felt the same way.

Despite being a base model, the Ascent ships with wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, which is nice to have, if a little bit odd without the wireless charging of the Ascent Sport. Heaps of USB ports – five in total (three in the front, two in the back) will keep everyone charged up, however.

The six speakers are fine for most of the time, but were defeated by Elbow’s The Loneliness of a Tower Crane Driver, which has a very deep bass line. But it wasn’t like I had it turned up teenager loud. And Elbow fans will know it’s not exactly a dance banger.

From new the Camry comes with a 12 month subscription to Toyota Connected Services, which includes a phone app called Toyota Connect. The app does all the usual things of remote unlocking, remote engine start, and flashing the lights or honking the horn. Once complementary access lapses you have to pay at least $4.95 per month for the full range of features, though some (like vehicle status checks and SOS call) remain active.

The rest of the system is pretty easy to use, but the lack of a proper home screen is always a bit baffling, more through nearly 20 years of that kind of thing on phones rather than anything else. The 'home' screen is the satellite navigation, which is pretty handy and generous to have in an entry-level car.

Sadly the screen itself looks a little lost, almost like an old 1950s television with a huge black bezel surrounding it. The functionality is fine, but it does rather keep reminding you that for another few grand, you could have the Ascent Sport's 12.3-inch screen that almost completely fills the gap.

As you might expect, the Camry has already been tested by ANCAP and scored five stars. It got an impressive 95 per cent for adult occupant protection, 87 for child occupant protection, 84 per cent for vulnerable road users and 81 for safety assist systems.

The Camry ships in all grades with eight airbags that include a driver’s knee airbag and a front centre airbag to prevent head clashes in side collisions.

Safety has been a bit of a Toyota thing of late, and the Camry doesn’t disappoint. Everything worked really well and behaved impeccably.

After a recent run of really annoying fatigue detection cameras screaming at me if I blinked too slowly, the Camry’s would just tell me the camera was blocked or maybe possibly I should take a break after two hours. Not once did it suggest I wasn’t paying attention when I looked down at the speedo.

Everything you’d expect of a modern car is there and works co-operatively in most situations.

An industry standard five-year/unlimited-kilometre warranty (for private buyers) extends to seven years on the powertrain if you keep going back to Toyota for servicing. Servicing with Toyota, as you will see, makes total sense. The battery is warranted for up to 10 years as long as you keep coming in for services too.

Toyota does capped-price servicing right, charging you the same amount every time for the first five services. Intervals are set at 12 months/15,000km and cost $255 each. A three-year service bill is a very reasonable $765 and five years an equally reasonable $1275.

Insurance landed at $2330 based on a comparative quote for a 35-year-old male driver living in Chatswood, NSW. Insurance estimates may vary based on your location, driving history, and personal circumstances.

That seems a little high for a fairly sedate machine like this, but maybe the number of Ubers has skewed the numbers a little, and driving parts prices higher. That’s all I can come up with given we’ve already found that each of its obvious competitors is cheaper by up to $700 annually.

Toyota says that the new Camry’s hybrid system is the fifth generation. The older car was pretty good, but the one time I drove it I thought the hybrid felt a bit weak yet was certainly efficient.

The company says this newer iteration should use half a litre less per 100km, but my time with the car on a very solid mix of highway and suburban/urban running yielded 4.6 litres per 100 kilometres. I didn’t hypermile nor baby the car, so that’s not a bad result. I think you could probably get it down to the official figure with a bit of care and patience.

Even with my fuel figure you’d cover over 1080km on a tank full of 95-octane fuel. With Toyota’s number, you’d knock over 1250km. That’s excellent going, and probably inspires a lot of confidence if you were to point this thing north along the Stuart or across the Nullarbor.

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For many years I was scorchingly rude about the way Camrys drove. Because, and let’s be honest here, just about every Camry I had ever been in drove awfully. I’d expand that to a pretty decent chunk of Toyotas built throughout the 1990s and 2000s, before the glorious arrival of the TNGA platforms that changed the game at the Japanese giant.

Here was a range of modular platforms that stretched in all directions from the Yaris to the Kluger and even further. Driving old and new back-to-back as I once did between RAV4 generations showed how stark the difference was.

The Camry this car replaces was the first Camry that didn’t wallow and wash through corners, rode with a more confident and taut feeling than any in the past, and felt nice to drive. The Achilles heel was the hybrid system not really keeping up with the 2.5-litre four and a fairly ordinary CVT calibration that delivered a lot of racket when you put your foot down.

Again, as we’ve seen in other more recent hybrid Toyotas, both of these things have been largely banished. The new set-up feels a lot more muscular with more electric push down low and in the mid-range, which makes for much easier highway overtaking and hill climbing.

Toyota doesn’t like giving certain figures related to the hybrid system, but it does suggest 170kW of power when the 138kW internal combustion engine (ICE) and 100kW motors are combined. The fairly anaemic 221Nm petrol engine torque figure is nearly doubled by the electric motor’s 208Nm, and you can really feel that when the battery is in the right state and your foot is on the floor.

All of these figures are slightly up on the old car – combined output by 10kW, petrol engine by 7kW and electric motor by 12kW. It does feel more than that, with a lot of hardware changes in the electric motor and lubricant specifications in the ICE and CVT components.

But where this car really impresses is just the way it goes about its business. The ride is incredibly well sorted, the road noise is low (except for one baffling own goal I’ll come to in a minute), the drive incredibly smooth and capped off with really nice, well-weighted steering and brakes.

Whereas the old car was a bit grumpy and noisy in certain circumstances, and tidy rather than mildly amusing to drive, the new car fixes both. It feels like the engineering team did a full-on Mazda job by going through every little thing and improving it just a little bit to deliver a marked improvement overall.

Steering response is crisper, and you don’t get a mushy brake pedal or clumsy transition between energy recovery and physical braking.

Weirdly, with all the effort put into the general NVH of the car, the wind rustle at highway speeds from the wing mirrors is quite jarring and, to my mind, inexplicable. The old car had it too. The windscreen and mirrors are carryovers because, really, this is just a medium-sized facelift. Surely a new mirror housing could have been shaped or take the lazy route and whack in some better stereo speakers.

MORE: 2025 Toyota Camry Hybrid – Australian first drive

The best answer to this question is 'not really'. Both braked and unbraked towing figures are listed at 400kg, so a tiny trailer is about the best you can do with the new Camry. If you need to tow, you’ll have to find something else.

The Camry has always been a solid purchase for a mid-size (I mean is it still mid-size anymore?) sedan because of its longevity and wallet-friendly vibe. But over the years it’s the more subjective stuff that has slowly improved, while the wallet-friendliness and longevity improved with it.

Now the Camry looks good – which isn’t hard given the dearth of cars of this type these days – drives well, and delivers a dynamic experience our forebears could only dream of. They’re not just good cars now, they’re actually really good cars. And they’re likely to stick around for a while to come as other car makers drop their sedans due to a lack of interest.

Heck, as I plunge ever further into middle age and my parents into very old age, the Camry isn’t a car I’d dread buying to support ferrying activities, but one that I wouldn’t resent anymore and might even enjoy. I’m not sure what that says about me and my possible decline, but as I say, it’s a really good car. 

Just maybe push on to the Ascent Sport to make it a bit nicer.