2025 Toyota Crown Nightshade Edition

The 2025 Toyota Crown is a large sedan that blurs the line between luxury and a regular commuter car. It also blurs the line between being a small SUV and a sedan, so in a way, the Crown doesn’t know what it wants to be. But after spending some time in it, it’s clear that it’s a well-rounded, near-luxury cruiser.

Interior

Sit inside the Toyota Crown and you’ll likely be taken aback by how nice and spacious it is. The Crown is a large sedan after all, so it’s no surprise that there is an ample amount of head and leg room in both rows. In fact, even the rear seats are heated, so anyone sitting back there will be happy in the winter months.

Up front, the leather-trimmed seats are heated and ventilated, the steering wheel has heat, and there are soft-touch surfaces everywhere, giving the car a decidedly regal look and feel. There are some hard plastics to be found around the cabin, though, which grounds it in Toyota land. It may feel kind of like a Lexus, but it’s not. 

Anyone would still be hard-pressed to believe it still, considering its extensive feature set. Leather and soft surfaces aside, the Crown is also outfitted with all the tech-savvy amenities anyone could need. There’s a large 12.3-inch touchscreen that sits in the middle of the dash, which features Toyota’s latest interface. The interface is easy to navigate and using the navigation doesn’t require much of a learning curve. But let’s face it, everyone uses Apple CarPlay and Android Auto most of the time anyway, so it’s good thing that they connect wirelessly to your smart phone.

Other features include a smartphone charger dock where you insert your phone like a cupholder, on-board Wi-Fi, and a couple USB-C ports in both rows. I can spend a whole article gushing about the car’s 11-speaker JBL sound system, because its sounds that good, but I won’t. Instead, I’ll just say that it’s very bass heavy (which I like), but it present the highs and mids of every song very well. There’s also a panoramic moonroof that doesn’t open, but it looks great at night time and accentuates a greenhouse effect during the day time.

Power and Driving Characteristics

The Toyota Crown is available with two different hybrid powertrain choices, but only the top-trim Platinum is equipped with Toyota’s Hybrid Max setup. That powertrain pairs a turbocharged 2.4-liter engine with an electric motor for a total output of 340 horsepower. The lower trim levels, including the XLE, Limited, and Nightshade Edition, come with the 236-horsepower hybrid system that mates an electric motor to a 2.5-liter engine.

It may have the weaker setup, but the Crown Nightshade Edition I drove had plenty of gusto when driving around town and getting onto the highway. At no point was I worried about power, as the hybrid system’s electric motor seamlessly and quietly pulled the car off the line with ease. The mini shifter stick takes a little time to get used to, but it’s intuitive once you do.

Additionally, there are four different driving modes to choose from – Eco, Normal, Sport, and Custom. I didn’t play around too much with the custom settings and left it in either Normal or Sport most of the time. As you can guess, the Normal mode makes the car feel, well, normal. Its steering effort is light with good feedback and the throttle pedal responds in a linear fashion. However, when choosing the Sport mode, the car livens up a bit. The steering effort becomes heavy, like a race car, and the throttle pedal is far more responsive.

Does it make the car faster? No, not really. But it makes it more fun to drive on twisty roads. But again, the Crown is not a racecar, it’s a hybrid. And that thought comes rushing back in when you press the brake pedal, which feels like stepping on a rock. That said, the brakes feel good, but the pedal effort takes a minute to get used to.

Otherwise, the Crown feels extremely well-planted when driving around and its soft suspension feels comfortable on the rockiest of roads. The cabin is exceptionally quiet as well, but I did detect some wind noise on the driver side when traveling at highway speeds.

Safety and Convenience

The Toyota Crown is fitted with all the safety systems needed to keep the car on the road and safe in the event of an accident. First and foremost, the Toyota installed its Safety Sense 3.0 suite of driver aids, which includes features like blind-spot monitoring, adaptive cruise control, and a lane-keep assist.

There are also front and rear parking sensors to ensure you don’t hit anything and a rear-view camera with a wide-angle lens to show you the peripherals when you don’t turn your head like you should. My main gripe is that it doesn’t have a surround-view monitor to make it easier to park, considering it is a pretty large car.

Exterior

The Nightshade trim level adds massive 21-inch matte-black wheels to the Toyota Crown, as well as black mirror caps. These additions give the car a slightly more menacing look, hence the name “Nightshade,” but I don’t think they are worth an extra $3,000 over the lower Limited trim level.

Dark trim pieces aside, the rest of the Toyota Crown looks sleek, but confusing. It’s stubby rear end doesn’t match its elongated front end, and the trunk lid is slotted like a vent, which further adds to its eccentric look. The car itself is also slightly lifted for 5.8 inches of ground clearance, which is a little higher than that of the Camry, giving it an SUV-like stance.

But again, this isn’t an SUV, hence the confusion. Either way, the Crown’s exterior is functional as the character lines, front air dam, short rear end make it aerodynamic for a large hybrid sedan. According to the EPA, the Crown can achieve up to 42 mph in the city and 41 mpg on the highway, which is impressive. I managed to average 39 mpg in my mix of driving on the freeway and surface streets during week I had it. That’s nothing short of amazing, considering the Toyota Avalon that the Crown replaced could only manage up to 32 mpg on the highway.

Summary

The 2025 Toyota Crown is an exceptional luxury sedan that has plenty of room for five adults, the amenities to keep them comfortable and entertained, and the safety features to get them to their destination safely. Is it worth the $49,860 MSRP that my test car retails for? Yes, especially considering an equivalent Lexus ES would cost more for the same features and a marginally better interior and driving experience.