10 Fun Facts About The Top-Selling Toyota Camry

The first fun fact is regarding the Toyota Camry’s name. Camry in itself is a word that is meant to resemble the Japanese word Kanmuri. Kanmuri in Japanese stands for crown. Toyota and other companies haven’t shied away from using this type of approach in Japanese market models, with the best examples being Tiara and Corona. This is a bit of a double fact because the Camry’s Atara trim was inspired primarily by a Hebrew word, atarah. This was a word that stood for the crown. Toyota might not be immediately known by the word crown, though it was inspired by it in the making of their name’s sake.  

Toyota started creating the Camry at a Toyota Motor Manufacturing company in Kentucky decades ago and continues to produce these vehicles. Kentucky has become a lovable place for Toyota, which is currently the home to its largest factory. Toyota is supposedly building 550,000 cars on an annual basis, and since its creation, it has produced at least 10 million Camrys. 

The Toyota Camry has surprisingly increased in size over the years, even if you haven’t noticed. In 1983, the Camry was just 175 inches. By the year 1992, the Camry had grown to about 192 inches, and at present, the Camry is about a foot and a half longer than that. Camry opted to increase the size so that it can officially be classified as a midsize family sedan. It was a very smooth transition that many people likely didn’t even recognize, and it may even continue to grow in the future.

Most of us know the Toyota Camry as being a dependable vehicle. However, leading into 2007, there was a brief oil issue that dealt a tough blow to the overall faith in the car. Toyota was hit with a lawsuit because the engines in the Camry had been “sludge-clogged” and were sold despite those deficiencies. This wasn’t just the Camry either, it was directed at Toyota vehicles as a whole, but of course, impacted the Camry. Toyota openly said that the issues weren’t their fault, though they later settled the case in the same year and provided quite a substantial amount of compensation in return. As you might have expected, building back reliability did take some time. The one thing that isn’t easy to turn back around is trustworthiness in the eyes of the consumers. Luckily, the Camry didn’t struggle for too long and buyers were sold on the vehicle not long after. 

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The Camry announced that it would cease all sales of the vehicle in Japan during the year 2023, and they succeeded in that mission. Part of the reason for the discontinuation of the Camry in Japan was that they sold just 6,000 during the year 2022. Comparing that number to the total number of Camry that get produced each year, Japan just wasn’t finding enough buyers for them to keep on selling there. 

The Camry these days has a powerful v6 engine, though it wasn’t always that way. When the second-generation Camry sedan came around in the year 1987, the company got hard at work trying to find an improvement. Then, the following year, we saw the introduction of the optional v6, which made 153 horsepower. It completely replaced the diesel option and was the main push in their advertising campaigns at the time.

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Toyota decided to stop offering the Camry AWD model in 1991. It wasn’t until 2020 that the company again continued with a Camry AWD option. That is a massive 29 years later.

The Camry once offered potential buyers the chance to pick from a variety of different body styles that were tuned to their liking. They started with a wagon body style to replace the hatchback in 1987, and later they introduced a two-door coupe in the 1990s. This coupe style had a deck lid spoiler on the back as well. But they didn’t just stop there. Almost a decade later, they introduced another two choices to pick from, they were both two-door Camry’s. They were the Solara Coupe and the Solara Convertible.

Toyota wanted to get themselves into the NASCAR world, so what did they do? Well, they decided that they should enter a Camry-styled stock vehicle into the 2007 Cup Series. Over the years, we’ve seen a Camry compete in a few separate NASCAR races despite taking on a slow start. They have been able to win a championship as well, taking home the victory in 2015 thanks to Kyle Busch being behind the wheel. Another part of this fact is that four of the top 10 Cup Series drivers during the 2022 year were driving a Camry. Oh, and we can’t forget to mention that we’ve seen Camry decked out in sponsored gear, most notably when it was candy-colored thanks to M&M’s. 

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It’s never easy to introduce a new product and have It become a smash hit. That was what happened with the Toyota Camry. Camrys were beginning to get created in Japan around 1983, and by the time it got introduced in the United States, there were over 50,000 buyers straight away. It was an incredible start for a compact that could become a hatchback or sedan. It was a slower vehicle, though clearly, the buying market didn’t mind that due to the other positives propping it up. All in all, Toyota recognized that they had a phenomenal vehicle on their hands, which is why they have continued evolving it the way that they have over the years.