2012 Toyota Camry

The new Camry is designed for more-stable cornering than the 2011 mode.

Toyota showed off the new Camry's maneuverability by letting a group of journalists plow it around a cone course.

A sea of cones littered the blacktop, an orange hell describing a half-mile autocross course filled with tight turns, chicanes, and one long straightaway. A small fleet of 2012 Toyota Camrys waited to tackle this course, not the kind of car I would expect to pilot through here.

But Toyota insisted that, with the 2012 Camry update, the engineers emphasized driving dynamics, along with the mundane virtues that made this midsize sedan a top seller in the U.S. Despite lessening the amount of option configurations to 36 for the 2012 model, I still had quite a choice in which to drive: 2.5-liter four cylinder, 3.5-liter V-6, or hybrid, with three trim levels ranging from LE to XLE.

For pricing of the four-cylinder Camry, Toyota offers a very low trim L model for $21,995; the LE model, which begins to have some reasonable tech content, costs $22,500. The better news is that the sport-oriented SE model, which can be had with navigation, only runs $500 more than the LE, at $23,000. The high-trim XLE model runs $24,725. The base Camry Hybrid LE runs $25,900, with the XLE model going for $27,400.

The highest priced Camry is the V-6 XLE, at $29,845. Although this one would come with many standard features, expect a few options to push the price just over $30,000.