2011 Avalon ready for the road

Toyota rolled out the car, touting its “boldly redesigned exterior,” at the Chicago auto show in February and wasted no time getting it to market.

It's one of the most important vehicles in the company's lineup, a large sedan that is the only product Toyota has to compete directly against similarly sized models from General Motors, Ford and Chrysler that appeal to the over-50 consumer.

While the base price for the Avalon remained the same as it was for the 2010 model, the car gained “a significant amount of new standard equipment,” Toyota said, “reflecting an excellent value.”

The Limited model's price went up just $200 from the previous version, but it also was given some new standard features, the automaker said — more than enough to justify the slight price increase.

Toyota reduced the Avalon lineup from three models last year to just two for 2011 to simplify the ordering process, the company said. The number of available options and packages has been cut by 40 percent, something that was made possible by including a lot of previously extra items as standard equipment.

Also a plus: the 2011 Avalon has been designated a Top Safety Pick by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, an independent testing laboratory that is partially funded by the auto-insurance industry.

To earn this designation, a vehicle must have a top score of “Good” in all four of the institute's safety tests — front, side, rear and rollover — and be equipped with standard electronic stability control.

The institute's stringent rollover test, added for model year 2010, requires that a vehicle's roof support the equivalent of four times the vehicle's weight; the federal standard is just 1.5 times the car's weight. The Avalon withstood a force equal to 4.07 times its weight in the testing, the institute reported.

The Avalon is Toyota's interpretation of a roomy American premium sedan in the tradition of a Buick. It was designed at Toyota's Calty Design Center in California and engineered at the Toyota Technical Center in Michigan.