The 2023 Toyota Crown is a marked departure from its spiritual predecessor, the Avalon sedan. Packing a hybrid-only powertrain lineup, including a new, 340-horsepower Hybrid Max offering, the Crown also gets standard all-wheel drive to go with its longer body and slightly higher ride height. . And while we’ve known all this for a minute, Toyota is finally sharing how much this thing will cost.
Prices for the Crown start at $41,045, including a $1,095 destination charge. That’s $2,100 more than the Avalon Hybrid XLE, though like that vehicle, it’s also modestly equipped. There are cloth/leather seats, heated front seats, 19-inch wheels, and twin 12.3-inch displays (a touchscreen running Toyota’s latest infotainment system and a digital instrument cluster). Toyota Safety Sense 3.0, the latest version of the brand’s active safety suite, is also standard. As of this writing, Toyota hasn’t launched a configurator, so we can’t say if there are optional extras for the Crown XLE or how much they’ll cost.
Stepping up to the Limited, we get the best price in the range at $46,595, or $1,350 more than the equivalent Avalon. It retains the same hybrid system as the XLE – a 2.5-liter Atkinson-cycle four-cylinder, an eCVT, and a pair of electric motors that draw on a nickel-metal hydride battery – but adds quite a bit to the standard equipment list. Above the XLE trim, the Limited adds multi-beam LED headlights, a fixed glass roof, heated/ventilated front seats with leather upholstery, heated rear seats, an 11-speaker JBL audio system, rain-sensing windshield wipers, And automatic parking has been added. Like we said, a good price.
Splitting the difference between the Limited and the range-topping Platinum is an optional Advanced Technology Pack. Again, Toyota hasn’t specified option pricing, but the package adds 21-inch wheels, a surround-view camera system, and a digital key system. Unless the price is ridiculously low, there’s not much to recommend.
And that brings us to the range-topping Crown Platinum, which is hard to decide. Starting at $53,445, it’s significantly more expensive than the Limited and has no analogues to the old Avalon. That number is only $1,300 less, for crying out loud, on a fully loaded Lexus ES300h.
And yet the price hike is easy to understand when considering the Platinum’s hybrid-max engine, which boosts output to 340 ponies and cuts the sprint to 60 from 7.6 seconds to 5.7. The upgraded powertrain couples with a unique all-wheel drive system that never sends less than 30 percent of torque to the rear axle. Adaptive dampers and six total drive modes are also standard, while 21-inch wheels and optional two-tone paint schemes are visual firsts. Still, $53,000 is a lot of coin, considering how nice the $47,000 Crown Limited is.
There is also an efficiency argument to be made. While Toyota originally announced that the base powertrain would make a combined 38 miles per gallon and the hybrid Max 28, the Crown is even more efficient. Per Toyota, the 2.5-liter model will return 42 miles per gallon city, 41 highway, and 41 combined. The 340-hp Platinum will return 29 city, 32 highway, and 30 combined. That improvement is nothing to sneeze at.
For more on the Crown, be sure to check out our full first drive. You can find the Crown at Toyota dealers in early 2023.
