#ToyotaCrown

The Toyota Crown may wear a well-known nameplate, but we haven’t seen it in the U.S. since the early 1970s. Now it’s back, replacing the venerable Avalon as the brand's full-size sedan.

And it’s … well, the 2023 Toyota Crown experience is just a bit different than what the Avalon offered.

The Toyota Camry and RAV4 are beyond ubiquitous at this point, as they’re the go-to cars for people wanting dependable transportation that doesn’t take a lot of thought. Newer models are surprisingly sporty, though they’re still the unfailingly practical commuters Toyota has always offered. The current generation vehicles are now several years old, however, and the automaker is expected to issue brand-new versions in 2024.

We return to our Abandoned History coverage of Daewoo Motors in the early part of the Sixties. Korea was a newly independent nation still in the process of building its economy after many decades of Japanese occupation. The new Korean government seemingly relied on two tenets in its earliest years: Centralized control and openness to bribes. 

Both those factors were at play when the government handed the production of all passenger cars to a single company, Saenara Motors. Via a huge loan and technical assistance from Nissan, Saenara built Korea’s first car, the Saenara (Datsun) Bluebird via knock-down kits assembled in South Korea. But once the government noticed there was too much capital flowing out of the country, they banned Saenara from buying more kits from Japan. The scraps of bankrupt Saenara were picked up by another company, Shinjin.

Iconic for being Japan’s default taxi or police cruiser for decades, the Toyota Crown has been in production since 1955. Our market even got a taste of the model during its golden years, with the automobile becoming the brand’s first product ever to be exported to North America. While it would eventually be supplanted by the Corona Mark II/Cressida in the 1970s, we’d see parts of the vehicle return to our market through the Toyota Avalon and Lexus GS.

Meanwhile, the Crown executive series of sedans (and occasionally wagons) have been going strong in Japan for nearly 70 years — evolving gradually in the manner that Toyota typically prefers. But there have been stirrings that the company might discontinue the model for Japan, replicating FAW Toyota’s decision to turn the car into a sport-utility vehicle (based on the fourth-generation Highlander) in China. Now we’re getting reports that a similar scenario is being planned for other major markets, including the United States.

Comfort, spaciousness, luxury, formality. All of these things mattered to the early-1990s Japanese domestic sedan buyer. Today we take a look at a sedan that possesses all of these qualities in spades. It’s the Toyota Crown Royal Saloon, from 1992.

I spent a week in Sweden back in June, and I’m only now getting caught up on the photos I shot of interesting machinery at the Bloms Bilskrot yard, located in Söråker. We saw this ’63 Ford Taunus 17M a while back, there was this straight-outta-1978-San Diego customized ’69 Econoline van, and now we’re going to admire one of the earliest Toyotas sold in Europe.

Toyota held an event in Ypsilanti, Michigan this week called the Toyota Hybrid World Tour, similar to the recent Nissan 360 event where the company displayed its foreign market forbidden fruit. I didn’t realize what a Big Deal the THWT was until I arrived at the hotel & conference center. I had thought that it was just some kind of ride & drive event but in fact it was a major corporate level promotion by Toyota. For the first time in history the company gathered in one place every one of its hybrid vehicles sold around the world, along with a few alternative energy prototypes and some history, including an example of the first Prius sold in the Japanese domestic market. Toyota also gathered high ranking executives like North American chief Bob Carter from California and Toyota Managing Officer Satoshi Ogiso from Toyota City. Ogiso is in charge of global product development and chassis engineering for the entire company as well as being the Chief Engineer for the Prius program. Regular readers of TTAC will know just how important chief engineers are in the Toyota hierarchy and Ogiso is more or less the chief engineer for all of Toyota in addition to the Prius. He was a member of Toyota’s G21 team, out of which developed the first Prius. Though new Toyota Chairman Takeshi Uchiyamada didn’t attend, he did record remarks prepared for the journalists in attendance.

Some forty years in the making, start-stop technology has arrived on your smartphone. Volkswagen launched an app that stops YouTube videos automatically when you look away from the screen. And it starts again, when you look back. The app uses facial recognition technology to capture when the viewer is looking away, only to resume when eyeballs are back on screen. PWHS (People With Heightened Sensitivities) will not like it: Averting your eyes during a shocking scene on YouTube won’t help anymore. The price of progress, I guess.
But what are the origins of this startling technology?