The 2024 Toyota Crown is the opposite of a typical Toyota product; it’s unconventional, daringly styled, and doesn’t feel like the result of 30 marketing meetings to match with corporate synergies, or whatever the corporate mumbo jumbo is these days. You could call it a replacement for the Avalon given its position in Toyota lineup, but the Crown feels unique enough to be considered its own thing. This could be Toyota’s attempt to compete with other full-size sedans, but that segment is in steep decline, with nearly all of the Crown’s potential rivals en route to be discontinued after 2023.
What Toyota is left with is a competent sedan that offers a slightly higher ride height, two stellar hybrid powertrains, and styling that you will either love or hate. Is that enough? With Toyota and its loyal customers, we’d typically say yes, but external market factors make it hard for us to believe that the Crown can be a hit in its current form. With an all-new Camry and a Crown Signia SUV variant coming next year, is there any reason at all to buy the existing Crown? We spent a week with the 2024 Crown Platinum to find out.
Exterior: Some Controversy
During our week with the Crown, we were constantly asked, “why is it two colors?” The black hood, roof, and trunk are available with Oxygen White, Heavy Metal, Bronze Age (two-tone-only), and the Supersonic Red sprayed on our tester for $975. While we admired Toyota’s boldness on the first drive event, spending a longer time with the Crown made us want a single color. Very few people reacted positively to the color scheme, but we can confidently say it attracted more stares than any Toyota we’ve ever driven, apart from the Supra.
In a single color, we think the Crown is rather attractive, but the decision to make it lifted like a crossover seems baffling. It’s three inches taller than a Camry, but only gains 0.1 inches of headroom. Ditto for the ground clearance, which is only 0.1 inches more compared to the Camry. We could imagine an elderly driver enjoying the higher entry point, but the Crown still handles curbs like any other sedan. This seems like a missed opportunity to build a true lifted sedan with a serious ride height increase. We much prefer the traditional Crown Sedan sold in Japan, but Toyota likely wanted to give the US model something to stand out from the Lexus ES.
Interior: Lexus ES Luxury
Toyota has done a remarkable job in the last few years making more premium interiors. The Crown, along with the Grand Highlander, bridges the gap between a Toyota-badged vehicle and a Lexus-branded one. The Limited and our Platinum trim tester both come with leather seats that are heated and ventilated up front. Opting for the Platinum locks you into having black leather, which darkens the cabin too much for our liking, but there is a splash of gold trim on the seats and the dash to add a pop of color. The base XLE trim actually gets fabric seats that feel super premium, and we recommend trying them if you aren’t a fan of leather.
The technology here is Toyota’s latest with two 12.3-inch displays, one for the driver information gauges and one for infotainment. We like using Toyota’s newest Multimedia Infotainment, as it includes wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. A main menu would be nice as would a tuning knob, but these are minor complaints.
Performance: Max Efficiency
XLE and Limited models make up around 82% of Crown sales, and that makes sense given pricing. These models are more affordable and pack Toyota’s excellent hybrid system with a 2.5-liter four-cylinder under the hood. This system delivers a healthy 236 horsepower going out to an on-demand all-wheel-drive system via an eCVT. The AWD system can send up to 100% of the power to the front wheels to improve efficiency or send up to 80% of the power to the rear. 0-60 takes a livable 7.6 seconds, but you will enjoy 42/41/41 mpg city/highway/combined, which is excellent.
In terms of driving enjoyment, we prefer the Platinum’s Hybrid Max setup since it packs a 2.4-liter turbo-four engine. Output is rated at 340 hp and 400 lb-ft of torque, and it goes out through a conventional six-speed automatic. This setup brings quicker acceleration, 0-60 in 5.7 seconds, but lowers fuel economy to 29/32/30 mpg. That’s still great for that level of power, but it’s significantly down compared to the standard Toyota Hybrid System. Unlike the base setup, the Hybrid Max has a full AWD system that can send up to 70% of the power to the front wheels or as little as 20%.
Driving Impressions: Earning Its Crown
Despite its higher-than-average ride height, the Crown drives very much like a sedan. Unlike some similarly priced options, Toyota tuned the ride and handling for softness rather than “sporty” driving. Sure, there is a Sport + Mode, but it doesn’t suddenly transform this into a BMW-rivaling thrill ride. The Platinum trim rides on Adaptive Variable Suspension, the first on a Toyota sedan, which floats over bumps and cushions passengers over big impacts. It does let the car lean into corners, but not so much that we’d describe the Crown as floaty. The steering is a similar story, with enough positive effort that it never feels sloppy, and that aforementioned Sport + tightens the rack up a bit without being too heavy.
Power from the Hybrid Max setup is prodigious, and it makes us wish that all Toyota hybrid vehicles had a geared transmission. The Crown is nearly silent during normal driving, and a quick overtake is no longer accompanied by a groaning engine hitting peak RPM thanks to an eCVT. Engine revs are delivered more sparingly since the Crown has gobs of torque to get by without straining itself. This powertrain is so smooth, it’s good enough for Lexus to use.
Practicality: Not an SUV
Of all the strange decisions Toyota made with the Crown, not designing it with a hatchback trunk may go down as the strangest. This vehicle feels like it was catered towards sedan buyers who wanted all of the advantages of a crossover, but then Toyota forgot to give it the most important feature that all SUVs have: a giant trunk! The Crown’s conventional sedan trunk accommodates 15.2 cubic feet of space, which is less than the outgoing Avalon’s 16 cubes. You could also save some money on a Camry and only lose a tenth of a cubic foot of cargo volume in comparison to the Crown .
It’s a similar story in the back seat, where the Crown boasts 38.9 inches of legroom. That’s less than an inch up on the Camry and it’s nearly half an inch less than the Avalon.
Other Toyota Options
Everything we just mentioned about practicality makes the Crown a tough sell even within Toyota’s own lineup. The Camry just got updated for the 2025 model year and it’s only down 11 hp compared to the base Crown. If you get the Camry with AWD, that differential shrinks to just four hp. No one is going to notice that small of a gap.
Then there’s the recently revealed Crown Signia, which offers the same hybrid setup as the Crown sedan but tuned to produce 243 hp. It’s also much more spacious because it is actually an SUV. This model will replace the Venza in Toyota’s lineup, and will likely smash its sedan counterpart on sales. Or if you want the added power of the Hybrid Max, which won’t be offered on the Signia, just get the Grand Highlander that bundles the potent turbo setup into a massive three-row family package.
Toyota also has the Crown Sport, a smaller model that resembles a Ferrari Purosangue, which looks perfect for the American market but hasn’t been confirmed for our shores. Toyota has too many great options that we would choose over the Crown.
Pricing & Verdict: Who Is It For?
Our week with the Crown left us asking the following question; this is very nice, but who is it for? It’s too soft to attract sports sedan buyers who want a fun car that can also take the kids to school and pickup groceries but it’s also too sedan-like to draw buyers away from their high-riding crossovers. It’s an odd middle ground that no one seems to be asking for.
Pricing for the Crown XLE starts at $40,050, which is about $6,000 more than the most expensive version of the current Camry Hybrid (pricing for the 2025 model isn’t available yet). We need to wait to see how close a fully loaded 2025 Camry gets to Crown pricing, but the difference seems too negligible to warrant a massive gap. The Crown Limited starts at $45,650, but requires a pricey Advanced Tech Package to get a 360-degree camera and other safety features like traffic jam assist. We love the Hybrid Max powertrain reserved for the Platinum trim, but the $53,070 price is already well past Lexus ES territory. The Crown is a very nice Toyota that we wouldn’t advise anyone against, we just think there are better options from the same company.
