If anything, the Toyota Venza, introduced for 2009, proves that Toyota will build vehicles for market niches other automakers don't even know exist. Toyota describes the Venza as "a versatile five-passenger vehicle that combines the styling and comfort of a passenger car with the flexibility of a sport-utility vehicle, to give customers a stylish alternative to the traditional sedan." OK. From now on, remember that no matter what you're driving, the Toyota Venza is a versatile, flexible, stylish and comfortable alternative to it.
What the Toyota Venza looks like is a crossover. Maybe it's not as boxy as other crossovers in the Toyota portfolio, but clearly it's a car-based tall station wagon with five big doors, a few SUV styling overtones and body panels that look as if they were folded in origami class.
The specifications bear this out, with the unibody Venza carrying either four- or six-cylinder direct-injection power plants transversely in its nose powering either the front wheels alone or all four wheels together. The Venza may not be quite as tall as most of its direct competition, but overall it's longer than most of them, too. Let's just call the Toyota Venza a wagon and leave it at that.
Toyota has also equipped the Toyota Venza with a whole slew of convenience features running from slickly integrated cubbies to hold stuff to enough whiz-bang electronics to keep the kids entertained from kindergarten right through adolescence and into graduate school.
Meanwhile, the doors are long and they open wide, so getting the Medicare cohort aboard is straightforward, too. Fold the rear seat down and there's enough cargo room to hold a full kennel's worth of pudgy Labrador retrievers. About the only family-friendly feature that's missing from the five-passenger Toyota Venza is a third row of seats.
It's an open question as to just how big the niche Toyota has cleaved with the Toyota Venza is. Maybe it will become the company's biggest seller. Who knows? But one thing is for sure: If you're looking for an alternative, the Toyota Venza surely is an alternative.
