When I started documenting Eugene’s Curbside Classics in 2009, this particular car was on my mind as one of the first to write up. My older son’s 5th grade teacher was already driving it back in 1993, and I took note of it back then, when it was merely some ten years old. And he’s still driving it twenty-two years later. I finally shot in 2010 and wrote it up at the old site, titled “The Most Reliable Car Ever Built?” Obviously, that’s debatable, but these RWD Starlets were about as simple and rugged as it got, in terms of old-school Toyotas.
And it wasn’t just me; in Germany back at the time, this generation of Starlet jumped to the top of the much-watched ADAC “Pannenstatistik” for three years straight, beating out the long-time winner, the Mercedes W123 diesel. Now that was a bit of a blow to the German collective ego. So when I saw it again the other day, I decided a little follow-up was in order.
I haven’t run into Art, its owner, in a few years, but when I spoke to him in 2010 about his Starlet, it already had 300k miles on it. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s around 350k now. It had never broken down for Art. The only repair he had to make outside of normal wear items was to replace some valve springs. And why do I still hear comments here not infrequently that suggest that Japanese cars were junky back then? Ok, rust resistance was an issue, one that the Japanese weren’t alone in having to overcome. But basic mechanical quality and durability? It was mostly there from the get-go. It was precisely what attracted folks to them from the beginning.
The Starlet was as simple and straight-forward as it got, with tried and proven components. But when it was effectively replaced with the all-new FWD Tercel, unlike GM’s new FWD X Cars, the Tercel quickly developed a rep for being equally reliable and rugged, including the first year of production. That kind of consistency is how Toyota ended up as the world’s largest manufacturer.
Don’t be surprised if you see another update on this car in 2020.
My more in-depth CC of a yellow Starlet is here
And one of its successor, the Tercel: “Toyota Nails Another One”
Is that thing Salmon colored ? .
Cute little rig , I remember these very well , don’t see many these days .
-Nate
To me, looks like it was once red, and is simply wearing the fading of 32 years.
Ah, for a time before clearcoat. Modern paint no longer ages gracefully like that!
Yup; faded red.
It’s very faded, but that color was actually a very deep red, and it went well with the blacked out trim. I can’t imagine they had more than one shade of red, and it was quite popular at the time, my father had the same kind of red on his Starlet. And this is how it looked when it was new:
My late wife had one of these, she bought it for daily transportation immediately after her first divorce. Reliable, yes. Enjoyable to drive? Well . . . . . .
She had the horrible combination of automatic (Patti never learned, nor had a desire to learn, to drive a manual) and air conditioning. Which meant, if you wanted to pass somebody, the first step was to momentarily switch off the air conditioning.
She did no have fond memories of that car. Being treated like the “usual chick” by the normal arrogant Toyota dealer at the time didn’t help.
Sorry to hear an automotive memory tied to your deceased wife. My youngest sister died fairly young, and when someone mentions the particular model car she drove in college (she owned two of them) I aways think of her.
As for the Starlet, It reminds me of an interviewing trip I made 32 years ago…I was trying to move closer to my parents (my Dad was in ailing health) and they helped me rent a car to drive to a nearby city for the interview. I wanted them to rent me an inexpensive car as I’d be paying for it myself (I don’t remember why the company I was interviewing with didn’t pay for the rental car)…and they rented a ’83 Starlet for me….it was the only rental car I ever drove that had a manual transmission. Five years before that, while in college, I was a transporter for Hertz (moved the one-way rentals back to their home location) and never came across a single manual transmission, even in small cars, so even then I thought it was unusual.
The Starlet worked out OK for me…it did’t have air conditioning, which I also thought was a bit odd (this was in the deep south) but I didn’t remember minding. Once I moved there, it took me 4 more years before I finally traded my existing car in for one with AC..
Back then, one of my Co-workers bought a Tercel, I thought it an odd looking car (I liked that it had FWD back then)….I prefered the Starlet styling anyhow.
I see these in Oman. Not often, but not that uncommon. I’d guess 40% of the market is Toyota/Lexus here. 20% are Jeeps (mostly the 80s-90s Cheroke XJ)
In 1999 I bought a 1987 Camry. The car had around 200K miles when I got it.
I’ve put another 40K delivering pizza and newspaper when the auto transmission gave up.
Even though I sold it for US$ 600,00.
This is my idea of the perfect in-town beater/errand-runner. The RWD makes service cheaper and easier in many instances, and the car’s basic goodness shines for what seems like forever. These little cars have put a lot of senior citizens in Camrys and Avalons in recent years.
I remember seeing these when I was a boy. I remember thinking “hey, I could drive something like this.” I was hoping Toyota would keep it on the US market long enough that when I got my license, I’d be able to drive one, or maybe even buy one. Imagine my bitter disappointment when Toyota discontinued the Starlet a year or two later.
So my question: where did these stand in the lineup with regard to the contemporary Tercel? The new angular Tercel showed up in ’83 (I think?) , but there was a previous generation of Tercel that I remember seeing on the streets. ’78 to ’82 according to Wikipedia. Seems like it would have been about the same size as these Starlets so I’m not sure how they were positioned.
This one looks to be in pretty amazing shape for 350K miles. I do wonder what happened to the headlight bezels though?
These were positioned in the line up as more or less equals to the Tercel, I think they were marginally cheaper but not significantly so. They are one of Toyota’s greatest hits in my opinion, dirt simple and durable, more so than the Tercel.
I think the Starlet was Toyota’s price leader. The US Tercels had engines that were about 10% bigger and FWD was considered more desirable for a subcompact car. Some confusion was created by the Corolla F/X ‘replacing’ the Starlet in the lineup, but that was really a matter of Toyota abandoning the bottom of the market due to voluntary import restraints. It would be about maximizing profit per vehicle for the next several years, so fighting it out with the Chevette Scooter for cheapest car on the market no longer made sense. Also, the F/X was Toyota’s first US-made car, which further helped increase volume in spite of the limits.
It’s a mixed reality, actually. In 1981, the Starlet (only one model/trim level) was priced at $5148. The stripper Tercel 2-door sedan (no hatch) was $4748. The Deluxe Tercel 3 door was $5408.
So the Tercel was technically the price leader, but in very low trim level and no hatch. In more comparable 3 door versions, the Tercel was more expensive, as it well should have been, given that it was roomier, rode better on its substantially longer wheelbase, and was a more modern car.
That’s some bizarro pricing strategy! A modern 1.5 liter, FWD sedan was almost 8% less expensive than a simple 1.3 liter haltchback, but adding a hatch to the Tercel raised its price by almost 14%? Although I suspect it was bundled with other features, that’s still a strange way of doing business.
The Starlet was slightly smaller then the 78-82 Tercel and though both cars were made in 1978(the Starlet was made starting in early 1978 while the Tercel was made in late 1978) the Tercel beat the Starlet to the USA market by a year with the Tercel arriving in 1980 and the Starlet 1981. While I like the Starlet, I think it overlapped too much with the Tercel. The 78-82 Tercel was offered in coupe, hatch and sedan and as the Starlet looks so much like the Tercel(when I was 10 years old, I saw my first Starlet and I thought it was a Tercel hatchback) the car did not sell as well as the Tercel and was gone after 1984.
I’ve also always been unclear about exactly what purpose the Starlet was supposed to serve in Toyota’s U.S. lineup. It seemed like the Starlet was only sold here for a few years, didn’t really replace anything when it was introduced, and wasn’t really replaced by anything when it went away. While I’ve never seen any sales figures, it’s my impression that they didn’t sell well. Here in Massachusetts, I don’t remember many Starlets even back in the day, and I can’t remember the last time I saw one. I think there was a time when I had actually forgotten that these existed, until I came across an ad in an old magazine.
While cleaning my house, I recently found a Consumer Reports used car guide from 1988, covering used cars from 1978-88. When I saw this thread, I figured I’d pull that guide out and see what CG had to say about the Starlet as a used car in 1988. As it turns out, the guide makes no mention of the Starlet at all. As if it never existed…
Toyota was a very conservative company at the time, and they simply hedged its bets. Also, both cars weren’t sold simultaneously on all markets. On some markets there was overlap while other markets got the one but not the other. In some parts of the world at that time, cars were more status symbols than appliances, and a fwd hatchback simply wouldn’t do if you could have an rwd sedan for the same money. In Sweden for example, we got the Starlet, but not the first generation of the Tercel. And then we got the second generation Tercel in ’82, just to have it orphaned after only two years with the arrival of the fwd Corolla in ’84. The Tercel 4WD was continued to be sold, but not the hatchback Tercel.
Besides, the Starlet was made on ancient and thus proven technology. I’m not an expert, and perhaps someone like Aaron Severson could shed some light on this. But to my knowledge, the Starlet was only a rebody of the ’73 Publica Starlet, itself a shortened Corolla of the previous generation. So, we’re already talking early 70’s if not late 60’s tech here. The production cost and r&d for the Starlet must’ve been very small. And it don’t have to be a bad thing to use proven technology, if the product have been refined during the meantime. Even if the rwd small hatch market was a dead end in 1980, I don’t think anybody had refined that concept to such an extent than Toyota did with the Starlet. I’ve said it before, but with a small engine, hotchkiss drive, and leaf springs, the wear and tear must’ve been absolutely minimal. Which begs its cockroach status.
The Tercel on the other hand was a completely unknown entity, it was Toyotas absolutely first front wheel drive, their entire line up was rear wheel drive up to that. And perhaps they just wanted to try the concept in parallell with an already proven concept, if something should fail? Like Fiat did farming out the trial and error of fwd to the Autobianchi Primula, which is a Fiat but in name. A few years later, and Fiat had adopted that concept througout their entire line-up. The only thing I wonder is the pricing between the Starlet and the Tercel. The retail price of the Starlet must’ve been pretty close to production cost, which begs me to wonder ifn’t Toyota subsidized the price of the Tercel to gain market share. It wouldn’t be the first time nor the last, like they later did with the Prius.
I don’t know specifically about the rationale for the Starlet/Tercel mix in this era, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it were primarily a factory capacity issue.
Total global production volume for some of Toyota’s model lines in this era was really quite large, so switching to FWD meant a lot of costly factory conversion. Toyota’s approach in this period was to tackle that in phases, which was why you had FWD and RWD Corollas, Coronas, etc. being sold side by side.
My theory would be that Toyota looked at projected demand for its entry-level cars in the U.S. and realized that they either didn’t yet have or couldn’t yet spare enough Tercel capacity to meet that need. So, instead of giving up the low end of the market, they may have decided to fill the gap with the Starlet, which had the additional advantages of being already paid for and thus cheap. Once they were further along with plant conversion (and started retooling to convert the Starlet to FWD, which I think was in 1984), the U.S.-market Starlet became redundant and was completely replaced by the Tercel.
That’s speculative, but it seems plausible in view of their other decisions of that period.
My friend Brenda had one of these when I moved to Mt Shasta in ’88, hers was a white ’81 I believe. She had bought it used a couple of years earlier. Brenda was into living simply and low budget so this car fit her to a T. We took it to Baja a couple of times in the early ’90’s, never had a problem that I heard about. Brenda passed on about 10 years ago and another friend inherited the car and drove it around town a bit, then he died and I just saw it driving around town last week, so I know it is still going. It was partly my experience with this car that led me to buying my first Toyota, a ’91 Previa, in ’97. I still have that, runs like a top, no major engine/driveline work at all, 268K so far and it still burns no oil between changes nor does the oil change color.
Who would have known that the future spiritual successors to both the Starlet and the Tercel would be the Yaris and the Echo prior to that.
These show up on a Craigslist in my area every couple of months, nearly always red. Reading that these sold new for over $5,000 surprises me. I wasn’t into Japanese cars back then and bought my new 1980 Fiesta for just under $5,000. I dare say that the Fiesta was a much better all around value and car.
I do have some questions for this car and hope I do not wake it up. Where are your headlight bezels and where are your 1982 license plates? Those ones are from the late 1990s. How big are the loads you shlep on your roof? Honest looking car with a decent patina, but I wonder how uncomfortable and boring it is to drive this car for over thirty years?
Obviously there was a minor front end accident that cause the bezels to go bye-bye.
Art does part-time carpentry work, and I’ve seen him with moderate loads of lumber and such up there. I do the same thing with my bars on my Xb. And he flips down the rear seat and hauls his carpentry tools inside. I’ve seen it pretty loaded up.
We got those same plates for our cars when we moved here in 1993, and that’s about when he bought it, used.
He just drives it around our smallish town mostly. he has a family, and their main vehicle is bigger and newer. It’s his errand/work car.
Boring? That’s not a question that’s readily answerable. One man’s “boring” is another man’s utility. Is coffee every morning boring? Let’s just say he’s not “into cars”; it’s his cheap and reliable way of getting around town and to his jobs.
Touche and part of me was thinking the bezels were broken because they had to be removed to replace the headlights. The fact this Starlet is used makes sense why the plates would be newer. I like this car and hope it lasts decades more. Is it a manual?
Would be amusing to own a Celebrity and a Starlet at the same time.
Stick. Hard to imagine an automatic Starlet; all wrong.
Oh that is good, at least there is some added fun to this car.
I was actually looking at getting one of those before I found the Tercel was on sale. Light, Rear wheel drive and with a five speed means a brilliant little city car. Naturally no owner even considered selling me theirs
I can’t imagine driving that miserable thing around for 20+ years. Reliability isn’t everything.
I wanted to comment on the issue of “Japanese V. American” reliability. I’m afraid the whole argument got tied up into a political knot, leaving the facts behind (back in the ’80’s). When I was younger, I was one of the “American car/strong like bull” people, probably for the same reasons people were “Ford” people or “Chevy” people. But I moved away from Michigan in the ’70’s and my first Japanese car was a ’75 Corolla. I drove it and my wife up to Michigan in it. And I noticed they were having “destroy Japanese car” rallies and people taking sledge hammers to them, etc. That’s the political side of it. But in truth, mechanically, most of them were bullet-proof, while American reliability was taking a nosedive. And yes, they were prone to rust, but as someone who’s owned a Pinto and a Gremlin, I’d say the rusting Japanese cars had good company. I would also say that the Japanese cars helped American cars in the long run, because they had to improve them to compete.
Wow I thought these had all been turned into drag racers
Still lots of these about here most have been souped up by the hat on backwards brigade they swallow rotaries rather well but still some K powered survivors around, Starlets do make a really good beginner rally car.
I always wanted to put a 5 speed 5K set-up into an early rear drive Starlet.. had the 5K in a Corona SW and it was a ‘yum’ engine to drive.. the little 1166cc 2K was also a sweet little honey of an engine, and if I had to choose between the 1172cc Datsun 1200 engine or the 2K..I would go for the 2K every time. Not that the little Datsun offering was not a superb engine in it’s own ‘BMC ‘A’ Series way!
in 1982, i tested a Starlet SR5 ( i think) and a stripped Tercel…the Tercel felt more lively, so i bought it. loved it. miss it.
to this day i still drive stripped models. they feel better.
A friend of mine has one that he’s owned for decades. He says it has in excess of 400,000 miles on it… or was it 500k?- well, it sure looks like it does between the Rust Belt rust and the Deer Belt dents. I stopped riding in it when the passenger seat started going through the floor, although with reinforcement (for the seat) I’d get in there again. It finally blew a head gasket and if it was mine I think I’d throw in the towel and crush it but he’s holding out hope. I like the li’l thing though; it’s kind of like a modern day Model T, simple, rugged, and economical, which is exactly what I want in a vehicle.
I thought the Tercel came first and then the Starlet as more of an entry level car? Either way what a charming little cockroach, beautifully shot in a great color. Love the roof racks — I’m sure the car is like a youth serum for its owners.
As Ingvar says, from Toyota’s perspective, the Starlet predated the FWD Tercel by about five years, originally as the Publica Starlet, an extension of Toyota’s never overly successful Publica ‘people’s car.’ When the FWD Tercel arrived in late 1978, the RWD Starlet continued in parallel and then switched to FWD, I think in late 1984.
Some markets got the Starlet well before we did, but in the early ’70s, there wasn’t much call in the U.S. for something smaller than the contemporary Corolla until the bigger, somewhat more sophisticated E70 generation arrived. As noted earlier, my suspicion is that the reason we got both the Starlet and the Tercel at that point was for production expediency or capacity utilization reasons while Toyota was in the midst of converting assembly plants to handle FWD.
In any case, it wasn’t that Toyota belatedly set out to reinvent the Chevette, but rather that they decided to federalize another existing model they hadn’t previously been selling in the States.