A Moment of Silence, Please - The Toyota Venza Is Now Well and Truly Dead

Maybe they should have called it the Toyota Camry SportWagon.

Maybe it wouldn’t have made a hint of a difference.

The first-generation Toyota Venza lingered for seven model years in the United States, ending its run with MY2015 before managing to collect 593 sales since, including four in January 2017. (They’re not easy to clear out, apparently.)

But the end of the Venza’s U.S. run in June 2015 was not the end for the Venza in America. Venza production at the Georgetown, Kentucky, assembly plant continued through the first 11 months of 2016 because of insatiable Canadian demand.

Well, now that demand has been sated. The Toyota Venza is officially dead. Kaput. Gone. Defunct.

Did it have to be this way?

In theory, a Toyota Camry wagon makes all kinds of sense. Take America’s best-selling car and make it more practical and flexible, without the RAV4’s lesser underpinnings; without the Highlander’s slightly-larger-in-every-way dimensions. Raise it to take advantage of the Subaru Outback’s goodwill. Add optional all-wheel drive. Result: outrageous success.

Or not.

At least not in the United States.

North of the border, the Toyota Venza quickly became a popular vehicle, perhaps boosted by its placement as the winning vehicle in 2009’s Tim Hortons Roll Up The Rim To Win contest that seemingly controls the lives of countless coffee drinkers each winter.

The Venza even managed to outsell the Camry in 2010 and 2011. Canadian Venza sales peaked in 2011 at 13,159 units when Venza volume in the vastly larger U.S. market — eight times larger than Canada’s at that point — was only three times stronger.

At its high-water mark in its first full year of 2009, U.S. Venza volume climbed to 54,410 units, only 3.6 percent of Toyota brand sales that year.

9.1 percent of the Toyotas sold in Canada in 2011 were Venzas. Never did the Venza rank among the top 50 in U.S. annual new vehicle sales rankings, but it ranked 32nd in Canada in 2011.

Canadians were clearly somewhat more willing to overlook Venza faults, some of which were glaring. Rearward visibility was atrocious, with a belt line borrowed from Carl Fredricksen.

The Venza’s interior design was odd to behold. Material quality was not what you’d expect. Rough ride quality on 19-inch and 20-inch wheels was not married to exceptional handling.

But rear seat space was vast, and the Venza offered 36 cubic feet of space behind those seats, more than double the Camry’s trunk volume. Moreover, the raised ride height is in keeping with society’s demands.

But it wasn’t to be, not with the more affordable RAV4 deemed sufficient by hundreds of thousands of buyers, the even more flexible Highlander operating in the same domain, and the Camry still an otherworldly success in an anti-sedan climate.

Toyota says the automaker built only 5,821 Venzas in Kentucky in 2016. Automotive News says the final 647 drove out the factory gates in November. 248 Venzas were sold in Canada as recently as January, enough to make it Canada’s 101st-best-selling vehicle, ahead of the Toyota Yaris, GMC Canyon, Ford Mustang, and Kia Sedona.

2016 Venzas remain sufficiently common on Canadian dealer lots for buyers who are into that sort of thing (my local dealer has six). But Toyota Canada spokesperson Melanie Testani confirmed to TTAC earlier this week, as if there was any doubt, that the Venza’s 2016 model year was the last.

Timothy Cain is the founder of GoodCarBadCar.net, which obsesses over the free and frequent publication of U.S. and Canadian auto sales figures. Follow on Twitter @goodcarbadcar and on Facebook.