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Driving Impressions
The Toyota Avalon is perhaps best characterized by what's missing: noise, vibration and harshness. The Avalon will never annoy you. It offers a smooth, quiet ride. It always feels under-stressed, quietly relaxed, and undemanding.
Like the rest of the car, the suspension is set up primarily for comfort. The handling is extremely well balanced, and the rack-and-pinion steering offers a good balance between road feel and easy steering, avoiding the over-assisted vagaries common with large SUVs and American cars. Driving hard on tight roads will induce some body roll (lean), yet the Avalon Limited we drove held any reasonable line we cared to strike through a corner, protesting only at careless tossing, and absorbing pavement irregularities at the apex with little apparent concern. The Avalon is front-wheel drive, with front struts located by L-shaped lower arms, and a multi-link/strut arrangement in the back. So it tends to squat slightly coming out of corners, and pull through them from the front.
The Touring model is set up for sharper handling performance than the others, with stiffer shock tuning and Michelin MXV4 tires on 17-inch wheels. The Touring has quicker reflexes, at the expense of some ride comfort and noise control, and delivers a secure, on-center feeling through the twisties.
Avalon's engine and transmission deliver unobtrusive performance. Fifth gear is a relaxed overdrive, allowing the engine to loaf on the highway. Driving over steep mountain passes with some determination rewarded us with 268 horsepower backed by an automatic that knows when to shift. In tighter sections, where our speeds were in the 30 to 50 mph range, we decided to operate the transmission in manual mode, tap-shifting from second to third gear and revving up and down through the corners.
(About that 268 horsepower: The 2005 Avalon was rated 280 horsepower, but the 2006 engine is in fact just as strong as the '05. The Society of Automotive Engineers, or SAE, the people who decide these things, issued new procedures for measuring horsepower and torque. In short, only the numbers have changed; the performance remains the same.)
Toyota's V6 engine pulls strongly at higher rpm and right up to the 6200 rpm redline, but it remains remarkably quiet in the process. It's a double overhead-cam unit with four valves per cylinder and an aluminum block and heads. A short stroke dimension means that it likes to rev, abetted by very low reciprocating mass and a very-low-friction cam gear. These are the characteristics of a long-life, efficient everyday engine with exceptional passing power. Our forays into canyon carving were not perfectly consistent with this type of design, and yet they were not frustrating, either. The horsepower is there, and the transmission will allow you to access it.
Add the tighter suspension of the Touring model and the Avalon is decidedly sporty. But that's not what the Avalon is about. It's a car that makes everyday use a pleasant experience, a versatile cruiser and around-town chariot that shortens long trips, thoughtfully insulating occupants from the jagged loose ends of the real world. That's been Avalon's mission since its debut in '94, and with changes since then it has only gotten better.
The V6 is a smooth power plant, and its very low levels of vibration are no accident; an active control mount cancels low-rpm engine motions. Transmission upshifts are governed by third-generation electronic software with specific engine mount tuning to reduce shift shock. Part-throttle upshifts are barely noticeable.
All this, and EPA city/highway fuel efficiency ratings of 22/30 mpg, albeit on premium fuel.
Vehicle Stability Control, Traction Control, and Brake Assist are dynamic systems that remain in the background until wheel slip, or skidding, is detected. VSC helps keep a skidding vehicle on the road by instantly braking one or more wheels, individually. We were a
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