Oh Toyota. You must be trolling us. We were all set to check out the Sienna as a serious contender for a fabulous family car or a marvelous minivan, but then we checked out your website and saw that you had the audacity to brand the eight passenger mom-mobile as the “One and Only Swagger Wagon.” Insert jaw drop and cry-laughing emojis here – we don’t even have words to describe our faces.
And then we Googled. And we found this piece of lyrical mastery. And OMG, you ARE trolling us! Toyota – I tip my hat to you and to your madly creative advertising gurus. This is how you own being a minivan… I’m sorry, a “Swagger Wagon.” And apparently you’ve been doing so ince 2010?! Where have we been? I guess it’s fair to say that minivans weren’t really on our radar at all a decade ago – we were just trying to not get our fake IDs snatched at the local dive bar. Although there was a second video released in 2015 featuring Busta Rhymes, but somehow we don’t think it made quite the splash the first one did. At the very least, we have to admit we are partial to the original music video – the second feels a bit too contrived. Or maybe we are just partial to the Sienna family rather than the Neubert family.
Regardless, now that we’re actually in the market for a minivan, we’re hoping that the release of the new 2018 Toyota Sienna will result in another music video that we can jam to while carting our kids to and from soccer practice, since we’ve recently realized we’ve become the stereotypical parents Toyota originally mocked. And yes, that realization makes me think, “Oh, mother-father” (Toyota was right, you can’t drop F-bombs in front of your four year old unless you want it repeated at the most inopportune moment).
All this is to say: the 2018 Toyota Sienna does seem like it’s going to have some serious swagger. The engine has been upgraded to a 3.5-liter V6 and has 296 horses galloping from 0 to 60mph in seven seconds. The standard safety features are dope enough to give the Swagger Wagon serious (Sesame) street cred: adaptive cruise control, a lane-departure warning system, automatic high-beam headlights and automated emergency braking will keep you on the straight and narrow, and the Entune 3.0 multimedia interface will let you ball out to whatever jam brings you back to the good ol’ days when the only thing “mini” you owned was your skirt.
Look, getting old can be boring. There are bills to pay and meetings to attend and kids to keep alive and sometimes you have to make sacrifices that feel make you realize that you are, in fact, an adult. And for a lot of people, crossing the line into minivan territory is one of those sacrifices. The Toyota Sienna knows what it is – it’s a parent-mobile. But it makes us laugh that Toyota can appreciate exactly what the Sienna is, can actually make us smile at becoming a stereotype, and is doing its best to give us a Swagger Wagon that takes the sting out of driving, well, a minivan.
