All-season tyres for an all-season Toyota Camry

This is a long-overdue garage entry.

The Toyota Camry has been part of the Petrolblog fleet for precisely six years, doing what Camrys do best: starting every time, asking for very little, and making a mockery of the idea that old cars have to be temperamental to be interesting. It’s the dependable one. The fallback car. The one you grab when something else is sulking, leaking, or having opinions about life.

Bought from its second owner in late 2019, the Tatty Camry arrived with 124,000 miles on the clock, peeling lacquer, a steering wheel polished to a high gloss, and absolutely no interest in being fashionable. Since then it’s covered around 11,000 miles, never failed an MOT, and recently sailed through another one – first time, no advisories – despite having spent a fair chunk of the year laid up. Because of course it did.

Maintenance has been refreshingly dull. Brakes, a front exhaust section, a heater blower resistor, a CV boot. Consumables. The sort of jobs you expect when running a car of this age. For a £350 car nudging three decades old, it continues to feel faintly indestructible.

With winter in full swing, thoughts have turned to a bit of gentle Camry winterisation. Nothing dramatic – this is not a car that does dramatic unless you approach a bend with too much enthusiasm – but a few tweaks to lean into its role as the fleet’s cold-weather safety net. New CarMats4U rubber mats via the Club Petrolblog discount, because carpet mats and winter are natural enemies. Fresh wipers, obviously. Possibly steel wheels, or at least painted alloys, because diamond-cut wheels past their prime are nobody’s idea of January fun. There’s even talk of a roof rack, potentially with skis fitted purely for comic effect and mild confusion.

Inside, an aftermarket Apple CarPlay unit is pencilled in. Not because the Camry needs modernising – it absolutely doesn’t care – but because long, quiet journeys deserve decent podcasts and navigation that doesn’t involve squinting at a phone wedged into a cupholder. Or, in this case, the tissue drawer. Yes, the Camry had a tissue drawer.

And then there are the tyres.

I’m a big fan of winter and all-season tyres, particularly on cars that are actually used rather than wrapped in covers and good intentions. In the UK, winter increasingly means wet, dark and greasy rather than snowy, and if you’re still rolling around on half-worn and cracked summer tyres in December and wondering why roundabouts suddenly feel exciting, this may be relevant.

All-season tyres make a lot of sense here. Better water dispersion, more confidence in the cold, and none of the faff of swapping wheels twice a year or storing tyres behind the lawnmower. Which is why the Camry has just been fitted with a set of Davanti Alltoura 4-Seasons. They’re designed for exactly this sort of use: everyday driving in a temperate, rain-soaked climate, with tread patterns aimed at reducing aquaplaning and improving wet braking. They’re not glamorous, but then neither is the Camry, and that’s rather the point.

It won’t make it faster. It won’t make it cool. It certainly won’t stop people looking down on it in supermarket car parks. But it will make an already dependable old Toyota even better at the job it quietly excels at: turning up, whatever the weather, and getting on with it.

Which feels very on-brand.