dean1484 said:At the shop I help out at now and then a member of a famous rock band that lives in town drives early 90s Camry's. Yes plural. He has several. To him they are the perfect car. He keeps replacing them as he wares them out (or they rust apart) with low millage clean examples.
That's hard for me to imagine. To each his or her own, but..... I have a deep-seated, burning hatred for those old Camrys. It stems from my years working a job that saw me in at least 5-7 different rental cars a month back in that era. I would actually cringe whenever (all too often) the clerk at the rental counter would hand me the keys, and I'd see "Camry" on the tag. Don't get me wrong, they were not bad cars. Actually, if anything they were TOO good, too perfect. In their relentless pursuit of ultimate reliability, the engineers at Toyota accidentally proved that a car can be "too perfect". They engineered out pretty much all the flaws and weak points, resulting in a car that was completely without objectionable traits, and also without any soul or sense of joy or enthusiasm. They were bland, antiseptic, there was nothing memorable about driving one, nothing interesting. I think a car NEEDS some flaws, some weird little shortcoming that gives it some character, that makes you remember driving it. As I have said since those days, all Camry's, whatever the paint color, are Beige.
I haven't driven the new generation Camry. It is certainly better-looking than the old ones, and perhaps it's more interesting to drive, but, no manual gearbox option equals "no thanks" for me. I'll probably me the last person in the US daily driving a manual transmission vehicle, as long as they don't completely disappear from the market before I die.... 
