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Toyota Sienna

4000 Tulip Tree Dr, Princeton, IN

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The Toyota Sienna launched in 1997 to bring Toyota's reliability reputation, already well established through the Camry and Corolla, to the minivan segment — and across four generations since, it's built one of the strongest long-term dependability records of any minivan sold in the US, a genuinely significant selling point for a vehicle segment bought overwhelmingly by families planning to keep a car for a decade or more. Its fourth generation, launched for 2021, made an unusually bold move for a mainstream family vehicle: dropping the traditional gasoline-only engine option entirely and making every single Sienna a hybrid, using the same basic hybrid-drivetrain philosophy Toyota had proven over more than two decades with the Prius, delivering fuel economy figures well beyond any gasoline-only minivan competitor while keeping the segment's characteristic third-row space and sliding doors. That hybrid-only strategy also unlocked an available all-wheel-drive system with no mechanical connection between the front and rear axles — a separate electric motor drives the rear wheels independently when extra traction is needed, an unusually sophisticated piece of engineering for a minivan and one none of its direct competitors matched at the time. Built at Toyota Motor Manufacturing Indiana in Princeton, the Sienna's specific bet — that most minivan buyers would rather have guaranteed strong fuel economy and Toyota's reliability reputation than a choice of engines — has proven durable enough that Toyota has kept the hybrid-only approach through the entire fourth generation, a genuinely unusual level of commitment to a single powertrain philosophy in a segment where buyers are famously conservative about changes to a formula that already works.

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