Well, it's good to have XM in the car again, that's for sure. Not that I didn't have an abundance of other alternatives, though -- the top-end (non-nav) JBL system has a six-disc CD changer that'll play CD's full of MP3 and/or WMA files, and that worked just fine for me before I popped for the XM. With 6 discs at 700MB per disc, that's roughly equivalent to a four-gigabyte MP3 player, all controlled through the head unit. Pretty cool. And, it has a well-hidden "Aux" jack you can plug an MP3 player into, and at least get good quality sound out of it. And, I found the JBL system's sound to be a serious notch better than that I had in the 2004Accord coupe -- the Camry system is on the "designed for the car ambience" side of things, and it has very rich, full bass, plus very good all-around balance. So, I'm very happy with all of that.
Oh, but the Camry non-nav system has a 12-character display for track and folder information -- and it wastes two of those characters for whatever satellite radio you hook up to it. So, I've got a whopping 10 characters for my XM display. I should have gone for the nav, to get its better display!
Mileage has been mired at the bottom of the Camry's EPA figures -- about 23 MPG. But, I'm averaging a whopping 650 miles per month so far -- with the price of gas last summer, and a bit of burnout from going everywhere all the time over the previous decade or so, I pretty much "took the summer off," and didn't go driving all over tarnation. I hope to get around a whole lot more this summer!
At any rate, my in-town driving is ultra=severe-MPG-killer stuff -- a couple of miles then shut it off type stuff. And, I really haven't had even one tank of gas so far that hasn't had at least two or three weeks' worth of in-town driving. We'll see how the gas prices go before I decide to pull an out-of-town trip long enough to burn a whole tank of gas on the open road -- last summer, a tank of gas was around fifty bucks, and the bug just never bit me bad enough to burn through a whole tank just to see what the car could do.
So, hopefully I'll get more of an itch for that this summer. In the end, looking at my old Accord mileage numbers, it was right in the same ballpark for the in-town driving -- I expect the two cars to be very similar in MPG numbers all around, just like their EPA numbers are.
"Smooth, quiet ride" has been much better with the Camry over the Accord -- of course, that's a big part of the reason why I went from the "sporty coupe" to the "XLE sedan," to get that smoother, quieter drive. And, Car and Driver can lambaste the Camry's handling all they want, but for "travelling on the open road at speed," my I4 Camry handles very well -- "like it's on rails" around the mountain twisties. Now, if you want to "push it through the twisties" trying to "have fun" and such stuff, the Camry (at least my XLE) certainly isn't the kind of "sports car" that can carve through things at well-over-the-limit speeds. But that's just not what I want in a car at this point -- I've done my canyon carving. Sure, it's fun, and I've done it every now and then, but I drive the car "normally" every single day. I'll take "every single day comfort" instead of the sporty stuff at this point in my life, thank you.
Problems have been minimal -- there was a bit of "drive by wire" or transmission hesitation, but Toyota released a TSB that remapped the I4/5A shifting behavior, and that fixed everything with just a few minutes of computer updating. I've got a wee bit of brake squeaking at very low "pulling out of the driveway" speeds, but they've got TSB's for both front and rear brakes, which I'm actually going in for next week. They've got a little kit of stuff that they install, which kills the brakey squeakies.
Otherwise, that's it -- a few minor quibbles that they changed in the production run and issued TSB's for to take care of the cars already on the road.
And so on. In the end, it's very quiet and comfortable, with a truly fine sound system. A very good "long-distance cruiser." Guess I ought to go out and do some of that with it, eh?
