The Toyota Camry remains a popular car year after year, selling 600,000 units worldwide. Half of those sales come from the United States, where it continues to perform well despite a shrinking midsize market. Toyota struggles to move even 1% of the Camry’s global volume in Japan, which is why the automaker informed Japanese dealers that production would be discontinued.
Japanese buyers, like those in the United States, have shifted away from sedans and towards SUVs and crossovers, which are becoming increasingly popular. As a result, the Toyota Camry will join the Honda Legend and Nissan Fuga, both of which were phased out of the Japanese domestic market last year due to low sales. The Camry, on the other hand, will live on in the global market, where it is sold in over 100 countries and remains very popular.
Toyota has produced more than 21 million Camrys worldwide since its introduction in 1980 and will continue to do so until the 2022 model year. The United States continues to be the most popular market, accounting for 13 million Camrys sold since the model’s introduction in 1982. After a complete redesign in 1992, it became a perennial best-seller, beating out the Ford Taurus to become the number-one car in the United States that year. Since then, it has consistently been one of the best-selling vehicles, with a fifteen-year run as the best-selling vehicle from 2002 to 2016.
In 2017, the Camry, which means “crown” in Japanese, lost its position as the best-selling Toyota model in the United States to the RAV4. Similar declines have been observed in other markets where buyers prefer SUVs. Nonetheless, the Camry and its smaller sibling, the Corolla, continue to play an important role in Toyota’s global product strategy and are regarded as aspirational vehicles in Asia.
The current Camry was introduced in 2017, and it shares design cues and customer demographics with the Crown in the Japanese market. It also shared the Avalon’s platform and demographics, which was discontinued in 2022. Toyota is currently planning the introduction of the next-generation Camry in 2024.
