A little while back, I saw this about Toyota and began thinking about the brand. Mr. DeMuro is right; in fact, he’s more than right. Today, Toyota isn’t just not bad, but cool.
How is this possible?

Well, first let’s figure out what cool means. Cool is a tricky concept. We usually just think of it as meaning good, but it really means something closer to having what a liberal would call “agency”, or the ability to be yourself and do what you want.

A celebrity is cool, but so is a bearded guy who flies a seaplane in Alaska. Porsche is less cool now that they’ve added turbochargers to their standard 911. Throwing away 50 years of history(again) because regulators told you to is never cool.

So where does this leave Toyota? Toyota is extremely lucky to have a mythology built upon boredom. As cars become more homogenous and more Toyota-like, Toyota can look like a true original by simply doing nothing.

The can actually be a true original by doing less than nothing.

Imagine if the next Camry had absolutely no styling whatsoever: no character lines, no LEDs up front, and no arbitrary shapes anywhere. Instead, Toyota simply built a modern version of their greatest product ever, the XV10 Camry. Whatever money this would save could be spent on higher quality components. After all, the very best appliances, like Kitchen Aid mixers and Vitamix blenders, don’t get restyled; they just work, and the story tells itself.

Now this isn’t to say Toyota should stick with a single chassis forever. Car technology tends to move faster than blender technology, but they can redesign without restyling. Think about the jump from the 3.2 generation 911 to the 964 one. Save for the bumpers, they look identical. The 964, however, was a thoroughly new car, with four-wheel drive, airbags, and crumple zones.

When higher quality steel and faster computers allow for safer stiffer shapes, Toyota should redesign. When driverless tech reaches a point where people expect it, Toyota should redesign. Aside from that, Toyota can leave the car alone and make incremental changes.

I know what you’re thinking, or at least what you should be thinking: “Toyota already tried this in the 90’s, you moron.” Yes, they did try this in the 90’s, but the world was a bit different. Our economy was splitting, and the people in a position to buy an ever so slightly premium product wanted something bigger and flashier, like a Ford Expedition.

The children of those Expedition drivers don’t want something quite so flashy. They may have groovy jobs in tech and media, but if kids are in the future so are suburbs and so are cars. Since they’ve been dragged kicking and screaming to the ‘burbs, they don’t want something that looks like they’re, you know, trying. They also don’t want something that’ll make them look, you know, poor. They just want something that’s, like, real. In other words, they want a Toyota.

This market may sound like small potatoes compared to prior decades, when the Camry was the de-facto ride of the vast middle class, but the vast middle class no longer exists. Growing up is never fun, but it doesn’t have to be painful. Toyota can build cars that meet today’s young college educated when they move to the suburbs. They will be simple, they will be real, and they will remind their owners of when they took Ubers.