The Toyota Camry mid-size sedan is seemingly unstoppable, having reached the eighth position overall in the American car market's best-selling top for 2023 nameplates. So, perhaps the rivals need reinforcements.
As always, the 2023 American vehicle sales were dominated by the classic Detroit Three pickup trucks – Ford F-Series, Chevrolet Silverado, and the Ram models. However, until the Toyota Camry popped up in eighth place, there were no passenger cars on the list, as the other models before it were the Toyota RAV4, Tesla Model Y, Honda CR-V, and GMC's Sierra series.
However, with almost 291k units sold, the iconic mid-size sedan is quite an achievement as it's one of just five passenger car nameplates to enter the first 25! Anyway, the Toyota Camry is clearly not lamenting a lack of rivals – with Honda's Accord coming closest with 198k units sold last year. Of course, we could also take into account the Tesla Model 3's performance, but that's a completely different powertrain.
Indeed, Toyota has decided to make the latest 2025 Camry a hybrid-exclusive offering, but that still doesn't qualify as a true competitor for the battery-powered Model 3, right? So, if you want something to rival it from an American carmaker, you're out of luck unless you count the lackluster $25,100 Chevrolet Malibu, which is powered by a meager 1.5-liter turbo four-pot hooked to a CVT.
Some Big Detroit Three fans would definitely like to see the Toyota Camry opposed by something cooler and more exotic than a cheap Chevy with a powertrain from yesteryear. Anyway, as always, the imaginative realm of digital car content creators has a solution – if you're willing to perform a quick suspension of disbelief, that is.
More precisely, Dimas Ramadhan, the virtual automotive artist behind the Digimods DESIGN channel on YouTube, has taken up the task of CGI-revealing a premium passenger car revival that might bring a smile to the faces of Blue Oval fans. Yep, the guess is correct: this is another unofficial rebirth of the iconic Lincoln Continental full-size and mid-size sedan. The series, which retired after the demise of the tenth iteration, is known to skip a beat from time to time, so it wouldn't be a surprise if we saw it return.
The channel's host also believes that Lincoln's revived Continental would be perfect for a brawl with the 2025 Toyota Camry because it would, too, arrive as a hybrid model – and as part of the mid-size sector, as far as we can tell from the hypothetical design project revealed by the resident pixel master. So, do you like it or not? Also, do you think Lincoln will ever revert to its old days of making passenger cars, or is the future exclusively sold on SUVs?
Aurel has aimed high all his life (literally, at 16 he was flying gliders all by himself) so in 2006 he switched careers and got hired as a writer at his favorite magazine. Since then, his work has been published both by print and online outlets, most recently right here, on autoevolution. Full profile
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