Living in New York City, I am always amazed to see how many beat-up old Camrys prowl the streets.

A lot of them are missing fenders or sporting that two-tone, quarter-panel-from–the-junkyard look. Nobody here seems to buy a Camry to style around town. It’s a car you buy because you can beat the crap out of it, and 100,000 miles later you can let your kid beat the crap out of it or sell it to someone else who will do likewise.

Toyota redesigned the 2015 Camry to give its prized midsized mule a little bit more thoroughbred swagger and sheen — making it look like something you’d want to take care of, so that maybe when you’re backing into a tight parking spot you’ll be less inclined to tap bumpers. It’s got a rear backup camera, which will help. But this newest version is also sharper-elbowed and sharper-shouldered in its styling, and on some trims there’s a new front grill that‘s really trying to look angry. “Demands respect at every corner,” barks Toyota’s marketing department.

We hear you, Toyota, but in the wheelhouse there’s not much that’s new. The Camry’s engine choices haven’t changed. Long a paragon of four-pot pragmatism, Camry offers its standard four-cylinder, 2.5 liter engine on the 2015 models, which gets you to 178 horsepower and a combined 28 miles per gallon. The XSE model, which we drove, also offers a 3.5 liter, 236-hp V-6 engine to do the loud talking, with fuel economy at 25 mpg combined. There’s also a 200-hp (combined) hybrid electric engine available that gets about 40 mpg.

Things were going well in the XSE, with its blue-tinted entry lights on the bottom door sill, the broad moon roof bathing the car in light, the phone charging wirelessly on the clever Qi pad on the center console. The XSE also had $1,200 worth of safety options such as a blind-spot monitor, lane monitor, and pre-collision braking system — options that should become standard.

I was beginning to buy into the whole bold new Camry idea when the voice from the passenger seat T-boned into the sentences forming in my head. “This feels like a rental,” my wife said.

How brutal! No, no, no, she responded, as if the Camry might hear her; it wasn’t a putdown, just an observation. The Camry is a fine car indeed, she said.

I agree: Nice ride, decent noise and vibration levels. Pretty comfortable. Nothing too fussy on the dash despite its Entune premium audio/navigation technology. But nothing to raise the pulse rate too much, either, and we were driving a jazzed-up version that weighed in at $35,000, not some fleet meat from the Hertz lot. Ours had 18-inch alloy wheels, LED headlights, and dual chrome tipped exhaust. The leather-trim seats seemed a little underwhelming given the rest of the package, but how much higher can you drive the price of this car anyway before drivers start balking?

That’s the point, isn’t it? You can drive out of a Toyota dealership with a perfectly nice Camry for $25,000 without having second thoughts. When you start pushing $35,000 for a midsized nice car, your thoughts start to wander to Ford Fusion, Hyundai Sonata, the new Chrysler 200, maybe even an Audi A3 — smaller but more luxurious.

It isn’t easy being popular, so all credit to Toyota for trying to raise Camry’s game and hold off the mid-sized hordes. But maybe there’s a better way to do this than add chrome and glitz and a higher sticker price. I’m sure Toyota will figure that out.

In the meantime, I expect that in 10 years someone will still be driving that XSE in my neighborhood. And there will be some big dings in that restyled grill.

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As of Monday, the national average for a gallon of regular was down to $2.77, according to the AAA Fuel Gauge Report, while the average in at least 10 states was under $2.60. At this time one year ago, the national average was $3.27 per gallon, which at the time was considered reasonable, if not downright cheap.

Wholesale prices for U.S. crude oil are down 38% compared with June, and analysts expect prices to keep dropping in the weeks ahead. The trickle-down effect is that American drivers will be receiving a holiday gift in the form of cheaper and cheaper gas.

How cheap? The national average may hit $2.50, and gas stations in states where pump prices are already low are all but guaranteed to dip into sub-$2 territory.

“We’ll see at least one station in the nation at $2 by Christmas,” Patrick DeHaan, an analyst with the gas price-tracking site GasBuddy told Bloomberg recently. “And that’s not really a prediction at all. That’s more like a certainty.”

“Drivers in southeastern states may see a select few stations selling gas at or below $2 in the coming weeks,” AAA spokesman Josh Carrasco said in a news release.

Drivers in all states can expect increasingly cheaper prices at the pump through the end of the year. And drivers in states where prices are already below average—including Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas—are most likely to see prices drop below the $2 mark.

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The upcoming holiday shopping season is crucial for the U.S. toy industry, and early data supplied to Fortune suggests Disney’s “Frozen,” as well as electronics such as Xbox One and the Skylanders game, will be among the top sellers this year.

Data provider Experian Marketing Services gave Fortune a look at the hottest toy searches for the week ended Nov. 22, and “Frozen” tops the list. With the Christmas holiday just a little over four weeks away, consumers who wait too long could find it challenging to scoop up some of the top sellers.

Roughly half of all Americans plan to buy toys as gifts this year, according to a recent Nielsen Harris Poll survey of more than 2,200 adults.