Toyota Camry Consumer Reports
Consumer Reports no longer recommends Toyota Camry. Find out why. Toyota

For more than ten straight years, the Toyota Camry has been the best selling mid-size family sedan in North America. Its recipe is unchanged: Camry established its reputation over amazing value, bulletproof dependability, and safety. However, Consumer Reports has announced Monday that the Toyota Camry no longer deserves a "Recommended" rating.

According to the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety, 25 percent of frontal collisions that have resulted to serious or fatal injuries were corner strikes. To minimize the chance of death, IIHS introduced a new small overlap frontal crash test, which is designed to replicate front corner impacts against trees, poles, or oncoming cars. However, the new Toyota Camry could only score a "poor" ranking on the small-overlap crash. Unfortunately, Consumer Reports had no choice but to drop the recommended ranking.

"Consumer Reports’ longstanding criteria for recommending vehicles stipulates that a model score well in our testing, have average or better reliability, and perform adequately if included in crash tests performed by the IIHS and the government," said Consumer Reports. "Initially, we held off factoring in this new test until the IIHS had put a significant number of vehicles through it."

Now, 60 cars and SUVs have participated in the new small overlap frontal crash test and only 11 vehicles have managed to earn the highest "good" rating while 15 vehicles are rated "poor." What's more, the Toyota Camry isn't the only vehicle to lose its Consumer Reports "recommended" ranking because of the IIHS small overlap crash test -- the list also includes the Toyota Prius V, Toyota RAV4 and the Audi A4.

Now, in order for the Toyota Camry and the other models to get recommended, engineers must figure out how to revise the frontal structure of the vehicles to achieve better crash scores on a retest. Here's a statement from Toyota following the disappointing IIHS crash test results: "With this new test, the Institute has raised the bar again and we will respond to the challenge. We are evaluating the new test protocols and can say that there will not be one single solution to achieve greater crash performance in this area."

To learn more about the Consumer Reports rankings as well as the IIHS crash tests, visit the official Consumer Reports site of ratings and recommendations for all Consumer Reports tested vehicles. Finally, visit www.IIHS.org to see how vehicles have been rated in the crash tests.

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