SPY PICS: Camry captured in camo

Preparations for a new generation Camry are already well in hand, as these spy photos from Carparazzi show.

TMCA has been telling us for a while now that the locally-manufactured successor to the current (ACV40R) Camry is due to go public in the fourth quarter of this year, with the hybrid version following in 2012.

The Americans might be getting their version sooner still, it seems — the northern hemisphere autumn or our spring, according to Carparazzi. With the Toyota sedan already undergoing incognito testing in the US, a sense of the way the new car will look is beginning to emerge.

Details are tucked well out of sight under the disguise, but the overall proportions of the new car are easily discernible. It appears to owe something to the Camry from two generations ago — the ACV36R model last sold here in 2006. Look at the high boot, rising waist and the sweeping C pillars for corroborating evidence of that, but unlike the earlier car this one doesn't look quite so under-tyred and the wheels fill out the arches a little better. And another way in which the new Camry seems to be diverging from the 36 Series model is in the nose, which is much more angular than the faired-in dual-headlight look used previously.

And Toyota engineers also appear to have chiselled off much of the current (40 Series) car's roundness, also easing up on the pinched-in nose for the new model. It's a look that may be adopted for other models in the Toyota range, we suspect.

Indeed, that seems to be happening already. Toyota has revealed how the next-gen Yaris will look, when it arrives in Australia near the end of this year. The nose of the new light-segment car looks very much like the paradigm for the next Camry's nose, underneath that cladding.

But the Camry also seems to be shaping up as a more conservative example of the new corporate look, with the frontal styling flattened out across the car and fewer of the smaller car's funky sculpture lines. That will leave the Camry more of a blank canvas for some of the aerodynamic affectations the Hybrid variants may require when they come to market.

— with Carparazzi

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