2019 Toyota RAV4 heads to New York Auto Show
And the compact-crossover battle begins anew.
When Honda unveiled the redone 2017 CR-V, one of its most potent competitors -- the Toyota RAV4 -- was still rocking a body from the 2013 model year. Now it's Toyota's turn to be the freshest crossover on the market.
Toyota will debut the 2019 RAV4 SUV at the 2018 New York Auto Show at the end of March. The automaker offered no additional information, but it included a teaser image that shows off the new ute's shape, which doesn't appear radically different to the old model. Simple formulae tend to work best in this segment anyway.
Even though the current RAV4 is pretty old in Car Years, it's still performing great in terms of sales. 2017 was its best year ever with more than 400,000 sales in the US, compared to the CR-V's 377,000 sales. It bears noting that Toyota doesn't separate retail (consumer) and fleet (rental) sales, though, and Honda doesn't sell much if any vehicles on the fleet side, so take those figures with a grain of salt.
If there's one thing Toyota embraced well before Honda ever did, though, it's a hybrid variant. The RAV4 Hybrid has been kicking around for years now, whereas Honda only saw fit to create a CR-V Hybrid last year, and it still hasn't made its way to the US, where fuel efficiency and crossovers are two topics hot on consumers' minds.
Either way, we'll see what Toyota has in store in about two weeks.
