These days, you don’t have to buy a sports car to get a sporty look, and even family cars are now routinely shaped and styled to appear as if they are ready to dominate the roads around them.
Case in point: this week’s Mitsubishi Outlander SEL S-AWD and Toyota Camry SE Nightshade. The Outlander is a three-row SUV, while the Camry is a mid-sized sedan, so they are fundamentally different. However, they do have some parallels, with aggressive styling being the most obvious.
Both the Outlander and Camry look fierce in any color or trim. The Outlander’s schnoz is stacked like a semi truck’s, with slit headlights on top and thick rectangular lenses beneath. The grille is thick and black, and it’s framed by shiny boomerang-shaped accents. It’s like a linebacker giving you the evil eye.
The Camry’s is more angled, with a horizontal-tined grille providing the basis for an upper tier that draws up to the headlights. I wouldn’t want either the Camry’s or Outlander’s front end on my wall, but they fall right in line with current design trends.
This extroversion continues to the sides, with the Outlander’s pincer-like contours contrasting the Camry’s strongly-defined center accent line bridging soft shaping at either end. It’s very easy for a car a decade older to look double that when parked next to them, though the less-faceted shaping of yore can seem serene by comparison.
The tested Camry SE goes a step further with its Nightshade trim, which adds bronze alloy wheels, black trim, sport-tuned suspension, and $1,000 to the price. The bronze wheels give it a slightly aftermarket look, as if they were procured by the buyer. Both can be ordered with trendy black wheels and trim, with the Outlander Black Edition and Camry TRD.
The Outlander and Camry can be bought in more efficient versions than the ones I drove—the plug-in Outlander PHEV boasts a 38-mile electric-only range, while the evergreen Camry Hybrid posts gas mileage figures in the mid-40s. Non-electric versions of the Camry and Outlander show only slightly higher prices for the Outlander, in the range of mid-$20,000 to the upper $30,000s. Though they aren’t in the same vehicle class, they hit their markets with very similar playbooks.
The more mainstream trim levels I drove each had a 2.5-liter, four-cylinder engine, with 181 horses in the Outlander and 203 in the Camry. The Outlander had enough juice for the daily grind, while the Camry felt powerful enough to be a V6. Handling is competent and low-effort in both, with the edge going to the Camry Nightshade’s firmer dampers.
Inside, the Camry Nightshade has bolstered front seats swathed in leather-like SofTex. I like how pliable SofTex is, but I dislike how sweaty my back gets against it. The Outlander’s buckets are big and broad and can be had with diamond stitching down the center.
Philip Ruth is a Castro-based automotive photojournalist and consultant with an automotive staging service.
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Published on December 1, 2022
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