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New Toyota Avalon Introduction You'd think that after dispatching a whole crew of Sciontologists to attract the eye of America's youth, Toyota would leave their core products alone. After all, there are plenty of folks out there who just want to transport themselves from Carrow's to the 18th hole in peace and quiet, many of them loaded with a half-century's worth of accumulated income collecting dust in their savings accounts. Shouldn't automakers be all over them like lawyers on an ambulance? Nope. Age is a mark of shame in this culture and all automakers are locked in a race to the bottom of the median-customer-age barrel. Every new car nowadays has to be harder, faster, and more emotional than before, or haven't you noticed? Although the new Avalon is essentially a stretched version of the latest Camry (again), it packs 88 more horsepower than the first one, there's a first-ever Touring model, and the body is a lot more chiseled. All these moves should further Toyota's stated goal of dropping its average Avalon customer from a tired 67 to a frisky 60. This all-new Avalon struck me as a tad tense by Toyota standards. I could actually feel the bumps I was seeing on the freeway - something Avalon owners probably aren't used to. Not until I saw the decal on the trunk did I realize that Toyota mistakenly sent me home in the Touring model, which firms up the Avalon's all-strut suspension and throws in 215/55R17 tires to match. Yes, there is now a sport edition Avalon, seriously. Sportiness is relative, of course, and on the fun scale, the new parts amount to a leap from, say, Toyota Camry to Honda Accord. Wee! Sorry, but the steering's too numb and the car's too bulky to support performance pretensions with much consistency. If you want sport, look under the hood. This is where Toyota got serious - serious enough to drop in the 4Runner's V6. Though de-stroked down to 3.5 liters, its 280 horsepower ensures that not all Avalon drivers will be left lane blockers. At least some of them will be there to pass slower cars, i.e. Buick LaCrosses, Ford Five Hundreds, Nissan Maximas, etc. Hmm, did the Avalon just go from slowest to fastest in class overnight? Taking a claimed 6.6 seconds to reach 60 MPH (which some have already beaten), Toyota's flagship can smoke just about any automatic front-wheel-drive car short of an Acura TL, and the engine note makes it sound pretty thrilling doing so.