As whole-life statements go, ‘I’ll never be old enough to play golf’ rates pretty high on my non-existent list of mantras to live by. In the same feeble breath, ‘I’ll never be decrepit enough to covet a Camry’ carries a similar degree of weight.

It must be psychological conditioning – playing golf always seemed like a pursuit best suited to the rich and/or elderly to me (unless Sega Megadrive is involved), while Camrys are the Toyota du jour once your turgid Corona has been crushed into a metal cube, and your care factor has withered to indiscernibility.

Yet here we are, clubs on standby, tracing the trail of the world’s longest ‘golf course’ while driving what is still the world’s favourite sedan – in this case a ninth-generation XV80 Camry Ascent Sport in desert-friendly Precious Bronze.

The desolate delights of Australia’s Nullarbor Plain are unfamiliar territory to me. Like most people, I’ve never been west of Port Augusta or east of Kalgoorlie – leaving 1850km of unexplored landscape, and about 1000km of Nullarbor Plain plonked somewhere in the middle, roughly spanning Ceduna in SA to Norseman in WA.

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Wheels, however, and any long-time Wheels readers as a result, has traversed this iconic stretch of tarmac on two landmark occasions – once in July ’77 in a Ford XC Falcon 500 GS long-termer, and again in November ’80 in an Alfa Romeo Alfetta 2000. Each time also in a sedan, with each incredibly well-suited to tackling the huge drive all the way from Sydney to Perth (without stopping for sleep!), but in a radically different era.

Editorialised around the Eyre Highway being a freshly surfaced ‘new’ road with bitumen for the first time – yes, it had been a dirt goat track prior – the ’77 drive (below) enjoyed the freedom of no speed limits beyond populated areas, with the thirsty V8 Falcon averaging a scarcely believable 176km/h during one 400km stint. The 1980 rematch, however, was a highly organised, factory-backed affair that saw the twin-cam Alfa reach Norseman in WA having averaged almost 141km/h since leaving Sydney, then arriving in Perth after less than 30 hours of non-stop driving, aside from refuelling.

Our 2025 Nullarbor Plain crossing couldn’t be more different – and not just because we’re allowing four days to drive 1400km from Ceduna to Kalgoorlie. First, while we’re (refreshingly) piloting another four-door sedan, today’s Toyota Camry is a petrol-hybrid with official combined fuel consumption of 4.0L/100km, or 70.6mpg in old money – an impossible-to-comprehend figure 45 years ago. Given its modest 50-litre fuel tank, that calculates to a potential range of 1250km, which is enough to devour the entire signposted stretch on one tank if you drive delicately enough.

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The other key difference is something that was hinted at in the ’77 adventure. It was only after becoming bitumen that signage began to pop up along the Nullarbor, suggesting photo locations for tourists and denoting available services such as petrol, motels and food, as well as water tanks, camping areas and emergency phones. Forty-eight years later, you can add solar-powered electric-vehicle charging stations and, if you’re game, the world’s longest, quirkiest 18-hole ‘golf course’.

After a crisp Indian Ocean swim in the netted pool off Ceduna wharf, we head to the Ceduna Golf Course to inspect the first two holes – Oyster Beds and Denial Bay. Each fairway consists of hard-packed dirt strewn with rubbly rocks, fronted by a raised astroturf platform for teeing off – the whole thing is both laughably ridiculous and quintessentially ’Strayan.

And unexpectedly popular. Two other cars pull up to tee off, though referring to a RAM ute towing a ginormous caravan as a “car” rivals the Ceduna “golf course” and “clubhouse” for bending the truth.

For me, it’s the actual driving, not flailing a frigging club, that is the real Nullarbor drawcard. And, perhaps unexpectedly, doing it in a Camry. Having known a multitude of familial sedans for most of my life (apart from an uncategorisable Mini-Moke Californian, and the odd air-cooled Beetle), it’s a bit like coming home for roast pork, crackling and lemon meringue pie.

Two things immediately hit home. The first is the Camry’s excellent ride and refinement. After suffering the continual compromise that is so many high-riding SUVs, not to mention the bafflingly rubbish ride quality of most EVs, being back in a regular passenger car – a leggy medium-to-large four-door riding on a generous 2825mm wheelbase – is an unbridled joy. Supple, sophisticated, relatively light (only 1565kg) and sweetly balanced, the latest Camry feels like a superb evolution of the traditional Aussie sedan … which I write with more than a tinge of sadness, and not just because we don’t build them anymore. It’s because I miss them.

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The second is the outstanding vision afforded the Camry’s front occupants. An expansively low cowl is one thing, but there’s an even lower beltline, relatively slim A-pillars and a panorama of riches around the pedestal door mirrors. Compared to a similarly sized SUV, the Camry is almost ’80s-Honda-esque in its visual generosity – providing a great foundation from which to take in the Nullarbor and its surrounds.

Our first stop is Comet Café in Penong which, according to the sign out the front, also happens to be the last proper shop for 1000km. As a warning for first-time tourists, it hits like a kindly administered sledgehammer.

Thankfully for my depressed self and my deeply un-Australian dietaries – no gluten and no eggs (not by choice) – Comet Café’s husband-and-wife team psychically knew I was coming because she’s also a coeliac and makes a great GF burger. The yellow food and meat pies that dominate Aussie roadhouse warmers are now fading memories, though the smell is still a great reminder about why a Chiko roll is never a good idea.

Beyond Penong, I get a chance to test the Camry’s overtaking stonk. Large utes and SUVs towing massive caravan-ish things mostly adhere to a 100km/h-ish cruise – presumably to save fuel though probably because they’re retired and wandering, nomad-like – so I mash the Camry’s right pedal time after time, sending engine revs quickly soaring as the Atkinson-cycle 2.5 makes a statement of intent. Our unassuming Ascent Sport gathers pace with newfound urgency. It feels as strong as any regular six-cylinder Aussie sedan ever did, but with added silkiness.

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We overnight at Nullarbor Roadhouse, around 300km west of Ceduna – a multi-purpose servo with a bar, restaurant and fuel bowsers, plus a concrete whale out front, some light aircraft round back, a low-rise motel to the side and a broad camping ground adjacent to it.

The motel’s white-blonde bricks turn Besser-block grey inside, but the early-’80s bathroom adds some sparkle with its mustard-swirl vanity, sand-coloured wall tiles and mustard dunny. Nature follows suit with a soft pink sunset in a cloudless sky, graced by a full moon. It’s our entrée to nowhere.

And the gateway to the coast. A mere 50km drive from the roadhouse, the Great Australian Bight Marine Park offers an easy opportunity to gawk at the towering cliffs overlooking the edge of the Indian Ocean, if not the vaguely promised frolicking whales. It’s a breathtaking vista ringed by kilometres of cliffs to the west and fascinating wrinkled sandhills to the east that curve in an enormous arc towards Antarctica and gradually disappear into the sea mist.

Back on the Eyre Highway, the view is similarly mesmeric. Low-lying scrub frequently fills the view in all directions, yet the highway occasionally brushes the ocean – differentiating the unexpectedly lush Nullarbor National Park from the desolate landscapes of the Northern Territory and Western Queensland. Here, the greenery never fades and the road is rarely dead flat. Instead, it punches its way through the scrub – a rising and falling ribbon of two-lane blacktop, contrasted against sandy dirt edges, that fades into oblivion kilometres in the distance.

Wafting at a lazy, cruise-controlled 120km/h – even though 150km/h would be of minimal threat to humanity – our Camry covers the 184km to Border Village in less time than it would take Bob Irwin to start an OnlyFans page. As its name suggests, Border Village sits about 200 metres east of the SA/WA divide, and thus the WA quarantine station, but it’s the only South Australian town (plus four towns in WA) to operate in the Central Western Time Zone – 45 minutes ahead of the rest of WA and 45 minutes behind SA. Colloquially known as ‘Eucla time’, we have to manually select Eucla on our phones to stop them flicking forward and back in 45-minute jumps – not ideal when you need to set an alarm.

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Beyond Eucla, the scenery delivers its first cinemascopic reveal. The first genuine hill of our Nullarbor sojourn feeds into a pair of tempting corners as the road drops and snakes off to the west, skirted by low-lying mountains to the right and inviting ocean to the left, though the British chap that inspected our Camry at the quarantine station said he’d been living in the area for four years and still hadn’t braved the water. “Full of sharks” was his literal warning, though his tone seemed to imply that a quick dip after sunrise might be okay. And so it proves.

Day Three’s casually meandering Eyre Highway provides some appreciation of the Camry’s crisply connected, expertly weighted electric steering tune – a considerable improvement over the previous model – as well as hours of lush electronica to provide a soundscape for the landscape, delivered via a 12.3-inch touchscreen (with wireless Apple CarPlay) that finally buries Toyota’s unenviable reputation for crap multimedia.

The Nullarbor’s western fringe also provides a cornucopia of interesting town names, including Mundrabilla for a coffee, Cocklebiddy for lunch (and a golf hole if you’re in need of a stretch), and Caiguna – plus the famous 90-mile straight (146km), the longest straight road in Australia, before reaching Balladonia for dinner and bed.

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Belting towards Balladonia Hotel Motel, we’re greeted by a fluorescent orange-pink sunset lovingly framed by the Camry’s tremendous vision, piercing from beneath dappled clouds. I’m then treated to my third ‘special’ meal of the day – a non-menu chicken curry, orchestrated by our Argentinian barmaids and created by a Filipino chef – which follows a lovely ham salad made by a French lass at lunch. It’s a welcome reprieve from three meals of crispy bacon at the previous day’s roadhouses, as well as a pleasing reminder that the Nullarbor has international appeal.

Indeed, the golf hole at Balladonia is called ‘Skylab’ – honouring the large piece of space junk that crashed into the earth there at 12.38am on July 12, 1979. The day after, US President Jimmy Carter rang the Balladonia Roadhouse to apologise for his country’s satellite debris and offered to pay for any damages – something that would be unfathomable in 2025. Part of Skylab’s airlock door now sits in a small museum adjacent to the roadhouse café, alongside a restored Vauxhall Velox from the 1950s Redex trials that is displayed crashing through the roadhouse wall, perhaps in honour of Skylab and Balladonia’s brief flirtation with fame.

The final stretch of the Nullarbor is a 218km kink to the north-east, up through the Dundas Nature Reserve and Fraser Range before essentially ending at a T-intersection in Norseman. It’s a picturesque final leg, rising and falling between modest mountains and increasingly large trees. But it’s the moonscape-like rock and sand flats skirting the tendrils of Lake Cowan that piques my interest, not playing two holes at the Norseman Golf Club right next door.

After physically inspecting the solidity of the surface, I meander the Camry out onto a rocky meniscus and drink in the vastness. It’s the kind of stuff we often used to enjoy on big Wheels road drives in big home-grown cars, and much like seeing Sydney Harbour Bridge up close, you never grow tired of its grandeur. Out here, the Camry seems almost small.

The immensity of the landscape provides a quiet opportunity to contemplate this car’s significance. As essentially the last remaining link to the large-sedan diet that once underpinned our existence, it deserves to be celebrated. Yet it also deserves the accolades that have been heaped on this latest generation.

This bronze Ascent Sport is essentially $48K driveaway in New South Wales, which is a truckload of Toyota for the money. It’s quietly handsome (though far sexier in range-topping, headroom-robbing SL trim) and immensely comfortable over long distances, yet it’s also eager in corners, light on its feet, and far more athletic than any Camry has ever been. As a handler, it’s a wolf wearing comfy Merino threads.

It has a golf-bag-friendly 524-litre boot and much easier rear-seat access than previous Camrys, though this dynamic surprise still can’t match a VE/VF Commodore for rear-seat comfort or three-person space, despite driving its front wheels. That said, the Camry Hybrid’s combination of 7.2sec-to-100km/h performance and supreme fuel efficiency remains other-worldly compared with what the lead-footed Wheels crew achieved on those epic Nullarbor crossings of the past.

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By the time we reach Kalgoorlie Golf Course, the numbers that matter are in. Despite being chockers with luggage and camera gear, and always extended when overtaking, our Camry has averaged an effortless 5.7L/100km – calculating to 877km between gulps of 95RON premium unleaded.

That’s a statistic rooted at the heart of modern motoring, not challenging the limits of man and machine in a cross-continent blast, thrilling as that may sound. Yet there’s arguably never been an Australian-market car better suited to a coast-to-coast thrashing than this Camry – if such an endeavour were still legal. It’s the first covetable Camry, a titan among a non-existent sea of competitors. And perhaps the ideal car to break the monotony of mediocre SUVs.

The other big take-away is that I might actually enjoy perfecting my golf swing. On Nintendo Wii.

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Photos by Leanne Wilson and Nathan Ponchard.

This article originally appeared in the June 2025 issue of Wheels magazine. To subscribe, click here.