staff@slashgear.com (Chris Davies)
2024-04-18 07:00:00
www.slashgear.com
You’ll struggle to hit $40k with the 2025 Camry, though a cunning dealer could probably load you up with mats, mud flaps, and fluffy dice if you really wanted to. The Camry SE FWD is $30,700, the XLE FWD starts at $33,400, and the XSE FWD at $34,600 (all plus destination).
Adding all-wheel drive to each is $1,525, and that doesn’t seem bad at all considering what you get. The standard Camry gets Toyota’s fifth-generation hybrid system, pairing a 2.5-liter inline-four gas engine with a pair of electric motors, to drive the front wheels. It’s actually the first implementation in the automaker’s line-up of this particular configuration: though the newest Prius is also a fifth-gen system, it has a smaller, 2.0-liter gas engine.
In the Camry hybrid, the result is 225 horsepower combined. For the all-wheel drive version, Toyota adds a dedicated third electric motor to drive the rear axle. That also bumps the total system power to 232 hp. Either way, there’s an electronically controlled continuously variable transmission (CVT) and nowhere to plug in: this is a regular hybrid, not a PHEV.
The result is up to an EPA-estimated 51 mpg combined from the Camry LE FWD, with the AWD version dropping only a point to 50 mpg. The front-wheel drive SE, XSE, and XLE land at 47 mpg combined, with the all-wheel drive SE and XLE at 46 mpg. Even at its thirstiest, in XSE AWD form, the Camry should still do 44 mpg combined.