New Camry, Spruced Up but Still Free of Flash

Toyota unveiled a revamped, lower-priced Camry on Tuesday that it hopes will retain its nearly decade-long dominance as the best-selling car in the United States and help the company regain some of the respect and momentum that has evaporated in recent years.

So important is the new Camry to Toyota’s recovery that the company’s president, Akio Toyoda, traveled to Kentucky so he could drive the first completed car off the assembly line and proclaim “100 percent confidence” in the work of his designers and engineers.

“You might say that this is an opportunity to show the world again what Toyota is all about,” Mr. Toyoda said. He called the Camry, which accounted for 22 percent of Toyota’s sales in the United States last year, “a symbol of Toyota’s success.” It has been the best-selling car in the United States for nine consecutive years.

The 2012 Camry, scheduled to reach dealerships in early October, cannot arrive soon enough for Toyota, which was the world’s largest automaker from 2008 through 2010 but is on pace to rank third this year, behind General Motors and Volkswagen. The company suffered serious damage to a once-impermeable reputation after recalling millions of vehicles to address concerns that some were accelerating out of control. More recently, it has struggled to overcome production disruptions caused by the earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan in March.
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