OK; this isn’t the first time I’ve done one of these, and we all know how cars have evolved. But still; if someone had told me in 1985 that Toyota would some day be building “Suburbans” in the US, I would have sneered or laughed. Impossible!
CC Outtake: Japanese Cars Then And Now
– Posted on July 7, 2013
Toyota were cloning Chevrolets in 1941 Paul, changing models wasnt that hard for them
The door handles of the Toyoburban are at roof level of the other two!
That is one very clean 1988/89 Celica ST. I miss the days of the economical yet (relatively) stylish coupe.
Well, the FR-S/BRZ is pretty economical.
I drove my ’87 hatchback 11 years and loved it. Strangely, the hatchbacks outsold the notchbacks by a big margin, but now I never see a hatchback survivor, just these notchbacks. After 11 years my hatchback’s weatherstrip was shot and water in back was a problem I never did solve. Maybe that’s why.
I do wish the FR-S/BRZ had that choice…
CC Effect! I saw a GT-S fastback on the way to work this morning. Next time I’ll follow it.
My first car was a Civic like the one pictured above. It had great visibility, simple controls and was easy to maintain. Excellent car!
I still have one as my daily commuter. Will drive it until it drops.
I had a 86 celica gt-s, it was a blast to drive but very twitchy on a rough road, the tight steering was a drwam on smooth roads.
Really like that Celica! The Sequoia? Well, a friend has one and it’s like a wheeled Lear Jet, but not really in the “classic” Toyota idiom.
Those Celicas are thin on the ground down here. The ones I see are usually hatches.
The interior is very cool for an 80’s car.
But I like the following gen much better. That’s still a sweet looking car.
I miss those Celicias and Civics. Never drove either, but they were good looking and by all accounts had great engines and handling. And look at the amount of glass area!!
Evolution or devolution? The disapaearance of sharp, flingable subcompacts in favour of bloated pig-of-an-SUVs is devolution in my book.
I do miss the old Japanese formula–small, simple, economical, and amazingly reliable. Loved our old 5-speed ’89 Sentra. That said, I had an ’88 Celica ST just like the one pictured that was so awful with regards to reliability, that it made my old(er) AMC Eagle wagon with a 4.0 I-6 look like an engineering marvel by comparison. Weird, huh? Heater quit in the dead of winter, ran hot enough to fry an egg on the hood in January, ice-cold showers while driving courtesy of a leaky sunroof, sudden unintended acceleration scariness, and it went through ignition coils like a bag of chips at a Super Bowl party. It sucked. I must have gotten an abused dud (though it didn’t look like it). It was that car that turned me off of Toyotas for a while. Unfortunately, their new crop of cars does nothing for me either, except maybe the Tacoma 4X4 (which costs more than a 3 series!) and Scion FR-S. I still don’t think anyone does big trucks as well as Chevy/Ford.
The coil eating is what killed mine as well. I was about two hours into a five day long trip back east(home) I noticed a drop in power but was neither interested in stopping and figuring it out or fixing it. I was young and just wanted to get where I was going. I put another 8700 or so km on it and parked it. I gave it to my brother who bought a jap spec engine then built it to scream. It would rev forever and sounded like a banshee. sadly he sold it to a friends son who didnt have the cash for snow tires a few winters ago who ran it off the road and into a huge rock, that killed it.
I imagine that in 1985, the idea that anyone in 2013 would still be building giant SUVs (except perhaps for commercial buyers or as a custom-built one-off for navigating the post-apocalyptic landscape) would have been greeted with skepticism.
This 4th gen Celica was one of the first Toyotas to come with a twin-cam engine (GTS), and what a jewel it was. This was back when DOHC meant a 7,000 rpm redline and sounds you only hear nowadays at a Grand Prix.
These were the first FWD Celicas and Toyota’s choice for shift linkage was cable, and classically so. No rod system here. It was noisy, notchy and precise as hell. The shift effort was super light.
DOHC after these early versions meant larger displacement, longer stroke and a more boring experience. Heck even that Sequoia is DOHC, but you would never know it.
That mid 1980’s Celica was in my mind the best looking of the Celicas. I never liked the ones that followed this gen. The gen that followed looked too bloated and the last gen of the Celica looked too wedge like(looked like a door stop)
The gen of Civic would last forever engine and trans wise but unless you cleaned the inside of the fender wells all the time cancer would set in especially in the rear.