2025 Toyota Crown Signia Crossover Needs to Make a Name for Itself

• The 2025 Crown Signia does many things well—handling smoothly like a sedan, impressing passengers with near-luxury interior appointments, and delivering standard AWD and a capable hybrid powertrain.

• Oddly enough, the name “Signia” appears nowhere on the sheetmetal or the instrument panel or embossed on the floor mats or seats.

• With the Crown Signia, Toyota demonstrates it has the bandwidth, bankroll, and global manufacturing footprint to reinforce its place in a segment it already dominates.
  

With a mainstream and luxury product lineup as vast and varied as any other global automaker’s, Toyota Motor Corp. should have surprised no one when revealing that its Crown flagship sedan would be joined by a crossover derivative to fit in between the RAV4 and Highlander.

The all-new 2025 Toyota Crown Signia crossover certainly exhibits upscale, aspirational styling—for instance, that back end sure looks like a Jaguar E-Pace—so could it conquest some sales from the similarly sized Lexus RX?

That’s entirely possible, but that’s probably OK because the RX could lose some sales and still remain No. 1 by a comfortable margin in its midsize luxury SUV segment in the US.

The Crown Signia does many things extremely well—riding and handling smoothly like a sedan, impressing passengers with near-luxury interior appointments, and delivering standard AWD and a standard hybrid powertrain capable of topping 40 mpg, based on our recent two-lane test drive near San Diego.

Despite all these attributes, the pleasant Crown Signia plunges into a roiling sea of 30 midsize crossovers, and it will take every ounce of Toyota marketing muscle to help it crack the top 10 in sales in America’s hottest vehicle segment.

Before this two-row, five-passenger crossover reaches showrooms this summer, a potential hurdle needs to be cleared, and it’s as fundamental as the vehicle name: This is the Crown Signia, but “Signia” appears nowhere on the sheetmetal or the instrument panel or embossed on the floor mats or seats or head restraints.

The liftgate will only bear the name “Crown,” which is exactly what they’ll see in the showroom on the sedan with the same name.

Confused? Yeah, me too. The issue goes straight to the top management. Toyota Chairman Akio Toyoda views the Crown as the pinnacle of the Toyota lineup, with a long lineage dating to 1955.

His argument as the all-new Crown was in development a few years ago was that the sedan and crossover should be considered one in the same—like very close siblings with similar powertrains and nearly identical interiors.

Best wishes to the product team in carrying out the boss’s wishes, which pose a marketing problem: Shoppers won’t know what the Signia is unless they are total geeks for the Toyota brand. Thankfully, the automaker will report sales figures separately for the sedan and the Crown Signia.

But look beyond the unorthodox nomenclature and you find a competent crossover with a bit more styling flair (inside and out) than the Toyota Venza it replaces.

The Venza arrived in 2008 as an upscale alternative to the RAV4, but it never caught on, barely cracking 61,000 US sales in its best year, 2021. For context, Toyota sold 435,000 RAV4s in the same sector last year, leading the midsize crossover segment that delivered more than 3.2 million units in 2023.

Now comes the Crown Signia, squaring off against popular crossovers like the Chevrolet Equinox, Ford Escape, Honda CR-V, Hyundai Santa Fe, Mazda CX-5, Nissan Rogue, and Subaru Forester—and of course the RAV4.

Will the Crown Signia move the sales needle further than the Venza?

It certainly could. It’s a solid performer that carries on Toyota’s well-established hybrid expertise: Every Crown Signia is a 240-hp fourth-generation hybrid, powered by a 188-hp 2.5-liter four-cylinder engine that seamlessly trades duty cycles with two electric motor generators while a CVT drives the wheels, which can be sized up to 21 inches in diameter.

A wide-open-throttle run to 60 mph will take more than 7 seconds, according to the spec sheet, but merging on the highway or passing is no problem for the Crown Signia. Owners will be more impressed with the combined EPA fuel-economy rating of 38 mpg.

This singular powertrain (and only two trim levels, XLE and Limited) makes for simplified manufacturing at Toyota’s Tsutsumi Plant in Aichi, Japan. Both the sedan and Signia share Toyota’s TNGA-K platform. The Crown sedan is two inches longer than the Crown Signia, which is two inches taller than the sedan.

Like the sedan, the Signia’s interior makes a fine first impression with premium materials, soft surfaces, leather-trimmed seating, bronze-finished trim, and standard heated and ventilated front seats.

Clearly, this interior shows the automaker trying to elevate the Toyota brand. The marketing team uses terms like “elegance,” “prestigious,” “luxe appeal,” and “sophisticated” in describing this quiet, spacious cabin that is more suited for city and suburban commuting than for weekend offroad adventuring.

Standard are a reconfigurable 12.3-inch color Multi Information Display and wireless Bluetooth connectivity, and voice commands can begin with “Hey Toyota” to awaken a virtual personal assistant.

As Toyota tries to move upmarket with the Crown Signia, let’s not forget yet another Toyota Group model: the slightly smaller Lexus NX that slots in below the RX and carries a base price below $40,000, despite its luxury brand status.

Meanwhile, Crown Signia pricing starts at $44,985 for the XLE grade with destination charges (and $49,385 for the Limited grade), suggesting the Toyota and Lexus brands are seriously overlapping in their pricing strategies, at least in this segment. (By the way, Lexus RX pricing begins at $49,950, further supporting this cross-brand pricing notion.)

With the Crown Signia, Toyota demonstrates it has the bandwidth, bankroll, and global manufacturing footprint to reinforce its place in a segment it already dominates.

How do you think the 2025 Toyota Crown Signia will do in a fiercely competitive midsize crossover segment? Please comment below.