I picked up a rental TCH (base model) from the local Toyota dealer today and will keep it until 9 a.m. Sunday. The dealer charges $110 for a three-day "weekend" rental. I figure it's well worth it to find out how much I really would like the Camry hybrid, since I find the usual test drive is too short to reveal much of anything about a new car. (I rented a RAV4 for a weekend before I bought one back in '07.) I drove the Camry around on errands this afternoon, making sure to drive it in stop-and-go traffic as well as on the local freeway.
I like it a lot so far. It's smooth and comfortable. It has 11,000-plus miles on the odometer. I haven't noticed any "fit-and-finish" issues yet. It has already passed one crucial test: freeway merging. When I was entering the freeway, I needed to get out in front of a car that was poking along in the slow lane, but too close to merge with gradually. So I gunned the accelerator. While the Camry was nowhere near as responsive as my 6-cylinder RAV4 would be in the same situation (duh!), it had sufficient pep to get out in front of the oncoming car and expand the distance between us so that there was never any danger of the other motorist needing to hit their brakes. One thing I've noticed is that the car is so quiet that while driving on surface streets, I tend to lose track of the speedometer (maybe because I'm trying to keep track of the adjacent needle that tells you what your MPG is) and I'm 5 or even 10 mph over the posted limit before I know it. I'm a meticulous observer of speed limits, and I really don't want to get stopped and have to say, "But officer, the car made me do it."
UPDATE: Drove from our house to Santa Cruz -- a distance of about 10 miles, mostly freeway -- yesterday to take in a movie. When I parked the car in town and turned off the power, the car informed me that I had achieved 40 mpg and said "excellent." Woo! Woo!
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