Wife would like a Camry, her personal choice. I'll have to check into that.
She's been in an Accord for a while now, which she likes okay. Before that she had a BMW which she hated. Said it was always in the shop. I've never had one, but that's the same story I've heard from everyone I know who's owned one.
Getting me talking about cars is not going to be very consistent with the "sporty" part of this thread, but...
At the end of the day my practicality gets in the way of too much "sporty." We could afford sportier cars, but we don't want to spend the money. Yes, as Badge847 points out, we could buy something used to allow someone else to take the depreciation--and that's generally our goal--but even then, depreciation continues, and the cost of ownership also continues.
The Camry is an excellent car for what it is: a reliable workhourse of a midsized sedan. Will likely run forever, and will perform all the jobs it is designed to perform.
I've shopped for cars threee times in the last 20 years (which I suppose is very little for the average American). Every time I have strongly considered Toyotas and Hondas, and each time I ended up with the Honda because of the way it "feels." I've really liked every Honda I've owned, but Toyotas are even more reliable and are probably the "better" car all around.
This time around--because of the boy's unfortunate miscalculation on a turn--we were thinking about a convertible, but it had to have room in the trunk for a weekend trip to the Coast or the Wine Country (1-2 overnight bags and 1-2 sets of clubs). As noted, the Mustang felt like a strong competitor, but when it came down to how we will actually drive the car, vs. the cost of ownership, we concluded that putting the top down a few times a year for weekend trips wasn't nearly enough to compensate for unresponsive handling (first, and biggest problem for me), poor gas mileage, higher cost of ownership, and more limited use for carting people and things.
We thought very seriously about the Honda Civic hatchback hybrid (hybrid is new for 2025, so only option was to buy it new). It is a very responsive car (i.e., fun to drive by my standards), handles well, has good power-to-weight (for what it is), and looks decent, even as compared to its sedan siblings. Probably would have bought it if the dealer hadn't been such a dufus. Instead, we found a replacement Accord (meaning, to replace our last Accord that the boy wrecked). It's a 2025, but used. Its owner decided he wanted something completely different, and that saved us somewhere between 3K and 6K of off-the-lot depreciation for essentially a brand new car. It was also a fortunate find, in that it was exactly the car (color and trim) that we would have picked if we were specifying what we wanted to a dealer.
In the end we have a lovely and very practical car. Not very exciting, though it does look pretty good.
One added note: our 2019 Accord depreciated approximately $1,000/year. Every car requires maintenance and insurance (and insurance for midsized, non-luxury sedans is pretty low), so our cost of ownership was very, very low. As an investment of capital, we paid less than $100/month to own that car. We're also people who will happily keep a car for 10+ years (we had the car before it for 13 years). The new accord is great in a very practical sense (and appears to get significantly better gas mileage than its predecessor hybrid that already did pretty well).
And that's also what you get in a Camry: a very practical car.
