Inside The Venza

The Venza's designers haven't just built a modern, attractive wagon and called it good. Instead, they've fitted the Venza with the very latest conveniences. Probably the most useful of these is a center console that slides and folds to reveal two large compartments. The one in front contains both a 12-volt outlet (one of two available to front passengers) and an auxiliary input for MP3 players.

There's a covered recess in the center stack that will hold an MP3 player, and it features a pass-through into the console to access the auxiliary port. There's also a small-items tray with a similar pass-through. This means you can connect your MP3 player and charge your cell phone without a mess of wires cluttering the console — a clever feature we'd like to see elsewhere.

The Venza's soft, cloth-upholstered seats never made our butts numb, while the backlit displays for the uncluttered instrumentation proved easy on the eyes. Both the audio system and dual-zone climate controls utilize a large knob/small knob arrangement where the knob closest to the driver controls the most important function — volume and driver temperature, respectively. The shift lever on the center stack is ugly but functional.

The rear seats recline for added passenger comfort and also fold flat to reveal 70.1 cubic feet of storage space — more than the Edge, CX-7 or Murano. Even when the rear seat is upright, there are 34.4 cubic feet of storage space behind the seats, again beating the crossovers.

Most of all, we found the 2009 Toyota Venza roomy and easy to use. Its doors open wide and its seat height makes ingress and egress as easy as any crossover. Six-foot adults fit comfortably in the rear seats — even when there are equally large passengers up front. We put a huge rear-facing baby seat behind a 6-footer and all was well, too.