The chap who lives a couple of doors down from me, whose mates all seem to drive late 90s Honda Civics, Volkswagen Golfs, and Nissan Silvias, has decided to take the glorious rebellious route and rather than go for something small, has gone for V8 power.
The Toyota Majesta, with its 4.0 L 1UZ-FE V8 is a lovely piece of elegance, coupled with some good old fashioned boganity. I myself have been down this road before, having previously had a Mercedes-Benz 450SEL 6.9 as more power is excellent and there ain't no substitute for cubic inches. Unlike the Civics, Golfs and Silvias that this chap's mates drive, the Majesta doesn't write cheques that it can not honour. It makes happy growly noises and dumps cash on the table. When new it made a handy 290 horsies and while some of those may have escaped. there's probably many that still remain.
However the existence of this car while making me very very happy, makes me question Toyota's sanity. Okay, they were never going to sell many V8s in the home market of Japan but in places like Germany where speeds are open, and in places like America and Australia where spaces are wide and petrol is cheap enough to warrant car that produce enough power to start their own oil crisis, is makes no sense to leave those markets to other companies. Why was there no V8 Camry?
The whole existence of the Lexus badge makes zero sense to me. The existence of this car in particular, further makes me question what the utility of brands like Lexus actually is. Presumably everyone who buys a Lexus knows that it is a Toyota motor car and also presumably they know that the badge on the front adds exactly zero horsepower and zero actual difference to the car itself. Especially when you consider that Toyota has also in the past made a Toyota Century V12, which in terms of reputation and sheer amount of luxo-box cache is worth far more than any Lexus.
I live in Australia and so my cultural needle points in a slightly different direction. A company like General Motors had no problem having a car like the Corsa (sold as a Barina) and the Caprice in the same showroom. Likewise, Ford also saw no problem in having a Fiesta and an LTD in the same showroom. Had the Caprice and LTD been sold in America, then they might have been differentiated as a Cadillac and Lincoln/Mercury. By having unified brands here, both the General and Henry built massively loyal followings, which they have both recently poured down the drain. Honda in the United States feels the need to sell cars underneath the Acura badge which is nonsensical to me, as Honda itself has already proven its name by being the engine supplier for some of the most famous Formula One teams on the planet; in addition to this a car like the Acura Integra seems like a waste of a label when the Honda Integra was already legendary and won touring car championships as a Honda.
The V8 in the Toyota Majesta proves to me that Toyota if they wanted to, could have very well put that engine into a Camry. There have been Camrys sitting in the street in front of it and it is pretty obvious that the packaging problem of putting a V8 into a Camry is not an engineering impossibility (rather, that if should have been a fait accompli).
A V6 engine tends to be wider than it is long. The reason why they work well in an east-west configuration in a front wheel drive car is that the extra space which is not used by the length of the engine, can then be used for the gearbox/transaxle. With a V8 which is north-south, the gearbox and differential housing tend to be separated. Sure, you could in theory run a shaft with a universal joint in it, to a housing with a single piece transaxle but that's almost never heard of. The usual arrangement would be a Borg-Warner/Tremec 5 or 6 speed box, with a differential out the back.
The necessary bending of steel required to house the drivetrain to throw power to the rear wheels, actually adds to the rigidity of the chassis. What I don't understand if when inventing the Camry in the first place, why they wouldn't think of that from the outset, considering that they'd have to solve the problem for Lexii and the Majesta.
What I find baffling is that for many years in NASCAR in the United States, the car of choice which is used as the marketing device, has been the Camry since 2006. The engine for the NASCAR edition of the Camry is almost certainly a derivative of a reverse-engineered Cleveland V8, which has been shifted from 351cid to 358cid. I have no idea therefore, why Toyota chose to pour water on their own fire when they could have thrown the engine from the Majesta into the Camry.
Can you imagine a V8 Camry or a perhaps a V8 Solara? Instead of the Supra being pitched for far more money and shifting far less units, a V8 Camry or V8 Solara would have gone after the Camaro and the Mustang. I don't know what the crossover section of the market would have been given that Toyota drivers are usually painted as being duller than dishwater but surely there'd have to be a non-zero amount of them that would have stumped up the cash.
If you actually drill down into the kinds of problems that Toyota have, they aren't all that much different to any other brand of motor car, yet because Toyota is chasing the kind of customer who would rather drift along in the left lane completely oblivious to the existence of the world outside, then the myth of the reliability of Toyotas is self-perpetuating; spurred on by the fact that Toyota drivers treat their cars like appliances and will change over before any problems show up, far more frequently than any other brand.
What percentage of rednecks would have bought a V8 Camry? If it is anything like the section of Australian bogans who bought V8 Falcons and V8 Commodores then it would have been a lot. By not giving the Camry a V8, they chose to be the default choice of the perpetually disinterested.
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