Toyota has advertised its Sienna minivan as a "swagger wagon," but the family hauler was short on bravado for many families. For 2015, Toyota has refreshed the Sienna, but is it enough to put a little strut in its step, err, ride?
Related: 2015 Toyota Sienna Price Jumps $1,680 Over 2014 Model
After driving it at a Toyota event in the Los Angeles area, the 2015 Sienna touts enough improvements to keep up with the competition — the Honda Odyssey, Chrysler Town & Country and even the all-new Kia Sedona — but it's not a class leader.
Toyota says that most of the changes for 2015 are to the Sienna's interior. It now has soft-touch materials on the dash and upper door trim that blow away the hard-plastic wasteland found in past Siennas. Upgrade to the highest Limited trim level to find the new Chestnut Brown premium leather front seats, but even the midlevel SE and LE trims have leather-trimmed front seats and feature a lot less of the dreaded hard plastic and a lot more thoughtful design details.
The Entune multimedia system's 6.1- or 7.0-inch touch-screen has been updated across all trims as well; the 7-inch touch-screen's glossy setting gives the appearance of an iPad screen versus a computer monitor. I'm a big fan of the Sienna's new multi-information display in the driver's instrument panel; it comes in a base 3.5-inch screen or 4.2-inch color display on higher trims. This screen gives the driver access to the trip computer, navigation commands, audio track information and more. For families who like to travel with movies and video games, the optional DVD entertainment system's 16.4-inch screen can display up to two images and has RCA jacks, an SD card and HDMI inputs as well as two sets of wireless headphones.
If your family is more concerned with packing in people rather than frills, the Sienna, which can hold seven or eight passengers depending on seating configuration, now has four sets Latch anchors up from three. There are two sets in both the second and third rows, making it easier to carpool with other families or even to reconfigure seating arrangements when Grandma and Grandpa are in town.
No mechanical changes to the engine or transmission were made to the 2015 model. Its 266-horsepower, 3.5-liter V-6 and six-speed automatic transmission delivered sufficient power, but I found it to be noisy.
Perhaps the noisy engine is why Toyota added its Driver Easy Speak system to the 2015 Sienna; this feature allows the driver to broadcast his or her voice through the speakers directly to the third row. You'll need to dig through the apps menu to find it, but the idea is that you can communicate with your third-row rascals without raising your voice. However, with all the cabin noise, perhaps it's the only way your voice will be heard. Frankly, I think it comes off more gimmicky than helpful, but paired with the conversation mirror in front, your family may use these tools to keep the lines of communication open in the Sienna.
With the 2015 Sienna refresh, Toyota has addressed the design complaints and requests for a more upscale, "parent-friendly" minivan. If you're looking for bells and whistles, Toyota joins its competitors and offers them, too. However, just as with any other vehicle, those upgrades are going to cost you, and without them, the 2015 Sienna will probably land somewhere in the middle of the pack.
Cars.com photos by Carrie Kim
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