Toyota says ‘No’ to Camry for Europe

Toyota will not reintroduce its Camry large sedan in Europe.

The Camry is the best-selling car in the US. Toyota sold 431,703 Camrys there last year. The eighth-generation model goes on sale in North America next month.

Toyota withdrew the Camry from western Europe in summer 2004 due to poor sales. Only 2,431 Camrys were sold in the region in 2003.

Some Toyota dealers would like to be able to offer the car once more.

“We sold about 500 units per year and dealers liked that car,” said Erik Louwman, vice president of marketing at Dutch Toyota distributor Louwman & Parqui.

Andrea Formica, Toyota Europe’s vice president of marketing and sales, said: “We have the Avensis large car and the Lexus brand, so we try to avoid model overlap.”

Wolf-Henning Fanslau, Toyota’s spokesman in Germany, said: “Cars such as the Avensis or the VW Passat show much bigger sales volumes.”

Last year Toyota sold 120,436 Avensis units in western Europe, according to UK market researcher JATO Dynamics.

Toyota will start building the Camry in Russia next year in a new plant at St. Petersburg.

The carmaker plans to build 20,000 Camrys there in 2007, but the plant is designed for 50,000 units a year, “a capacity that we want to reach as soon as the market permits”, Toyota Europe’s CEO Shinichi Sasaki told Automotive News Europe in November.

Formica expects Toyota to sell 18,500 Camrys in Russia this year, up from 14,000 units in 2005. Camrys currently are exported from Japan to Russia and the Ukraine.

– Wim Oude Weernink and Jens Meiners contributed