Toyota May Be Planning The Sportier Camry Fans Have Been Waiting For

It's been a while since the Toyota Camry was truly fun, with the V6-powered Camry TRD disappearing after the 2024 model year, along with the engine itself, and a new one isn't happening because Toyota Racing Developments now refers to tuned body-on-frame vehicles only, while cars and crossovers will use Gazoo Racing and GR Sport branding. But between today's hybrid Camry and any possible GR variant, there's another possibility: Camry Apex Edition. CarBuzz discovered a new trademark for the name Camry Apex filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, and it could be just the sort of warmed-up midsize sedan the lineup has been missing.

Camry Apex Edition Could Be a Bigger Corolla Apex Edition

In the middle of 2020, Toyota revealed the Corolla Apex Edition, limited to 6,000 SE- and XSE-based units for the U.S. market, just 120 of which were SEs with a six-speed manual transmission and rev-matching. The rest had CVTs, but all of them boasted lower sport-tuned suspension, stiffer sway bars, lighter 18-inch wheels available with summer performance rubber, and a special exhaust with a unique tip. The 168-horsepower 2.0-liter four-cylinder was unchanged, and presumably, the Camry Apex Edition would follow a similar recipe - stiffer suspension, stickier rubber, nice wheels, a subtle restyling, and an unchanged powertrain. For the record, today's Camry features a 2.5-liter naturally aspirated four-pot with hybrid assistance that powers either the front or all four wheels through an e-CVT. Due to the additional effort required to fit a manual transmission, it's unclear whether the Camry Apex would get a stick shifter, but if the production run is as low as it was with the Corolla Apex Edition, perhaps the juice would be worth the squeeze. Of course, a trademark filing is no guarantee that the model is going into production, but Toyota has been doing a lot to lose its boring image, including with the Camry.

Toyota's Performance Ambitions Extend to All Models

Performance-focused Toyota models have been appearing throughout the price spectrum, from the GR GT supercar at the top to the GR Corolla and, in other markets, the GR Yaris, but there's still no sporty Camry, though engineers signaled their desire for such a creation with a two-engine, seven-cylinder prototype with all-wheel drive and a meaty 700 horsepower revealed at this year's Super Taikyu Fuji 24-Hour Race. Toyota also revealed the TR Camry at the race, featuring a longitudinally mounted 2.0-liter motor to make it rear-drive and a manual gearbox. Hopefully, these two one-offs created enough hype to justify something more extreme, but a Camry Apex would be a nice middle ground in the meantime.

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