2006 Camry for non experts

Our 2006 Camry has been good to us. It may not be bigger than older models in objective terms, but they've made good use of the space. There's enough leg room and enough head room, and you can always adjust the seat. Only if you have well nourished (such as me) adults in both front and back on the same side do you have to adjust the seat carefully for everyone to be comfortable, otherwise its a breeze. There are three seat belts in back, which makes sense since sometimes three people do ride in back, but is not as convenient as it sounds. Especially if you're wearing winter coats, your fingers tend to find the wrong socket for your rear seat belt, and you spend a few minutes wondering why it won't click into place before rethinking.

I'm not an auto expert, so all I'll say about maintenance is no non routine repairs so far. This is good, because even if the warranty covers them taking the car back to the dealer is a nuisance. We've done all our oil changes at a local garage.

The ride is smooth. I never noticed this before we tried out the Toyota Scion, which felt a bit bumpy on the road. Now I appreciate the Camry. It's a bit smoother than the Corolla even, which I never used to notice.

The passenger side airbag goes on automatically if someone more than eighty pounds sits in the passenger seat, but you can switch it off if you're read one of those studies about how airbags don't automatically improve safety for very tall or short people.

The radio comes with a CD player that will hold up to six CDs at once. Oddly enough, it always seems to have six of my wife's CDs in it. This may be a manufacturers defect, but they dealership can't seem to fix it. We also got nine months free satellite radio. They don't ask for your credit card, so you don't have a major problem if you don't want to keep it. My wife wanted to keep it, but it goes out faster than regular radio if you go into a tunnel, since the signal is from directly overhead. It does have many channels though.

You get the good handling you expect from a small car, plenty of acceleration to get on the parkway. The braking is smooth too. Then again, we use this car mostly to commute, and are not aggressive drivers.

The clearance if good, you shouldn't drive up and down curbs on purpose, but nothing terrible happens when you do it by accident.

I'd say more about this car if I could, but I'm not into cars and never notice unless something goes wrong.