By now in my life, I was well into college and ready to get my hands on something new. I was working a job and commuting to college giving me greater freedom. My friend and I decided we should try and get a project car that we could work on together. That sounded fun, so again off to the classifieds I went. We had a tight budget aiming for around a grand and we wanted to look for something that could easily be worked on and resold. This was still pre-covid in July of 2019, so there were some choices.
The San Diego area had a number of cool non-running cars that he was interested in. How about a Porsche 944 mid engine tear down needing to be reassembled? Sounds easier than it probably is right? So we took a look at an early Mazda Miata with the 1.6 that wouldn’t crank under its own power. In fact, it wouldn’t do anything even when hooked up to power and it was far from a perfect specimen. We viewed an E36 in a sketchy neighborhood (probably stolen) and decided that it should probably be my turn to pick out the next car we looked at.
A much more ideal E36 specimen from another CC user.
My pick was for something practical that would have some demand on the used market. Not a lot of that exists for good reason, but Craigslist led me to a 2006 Toyota Corolla with high mileage. The best part? It ran and drove with its current registration. We immediately took the hour plus drive out to nowhere to take a look at this vehicle.
The Ominous Craigslist Advertisement that caught my eye. First $1000 takes it
When we got there we were greeted by a man who was looking to get rid of the car QUICK. He had the paperwork from the auction he purchased it at and allowed us little time to take a look at it. The only major problems we saw were a little bit of rust and non-functioning air conditioning. He allowed a roughly 1 minute test drive that consisted of ensuring the car moved. Compared to what we were looking at elsewhere, it was enough to convince us this was the best we could do.
Miraculously it turned out to drive pretty well. A nearly 80-mile drive back showed that everything functioned as it should with the exception of the faults we had previously found. The car was quasi-disgusting, but what do you expect from this price point? Bonus points were that it came with a manual transmission and the obligatory aftermarket subwoofer.
When we arrived back home we took to cleaning the car up as best we could. It turned out the rust was a little worse than we anticipated, but with some care we got the car looking good. Other faults we found were that the CD player failed to work, the dash lights didn’t fully illuminate, and the car needed an alignment. I will also add, the steering wheel was a lost cause that even the strongest chemicals couldn’t bring to a bare hand worthy state. It received the cheapest of covers we could find.
While we tooled on the car a bit, and with some preventative maintenance we also were able to drive it around. Being a Toyota it functioned as new and gave all the driving pleasure that one would expect from a mid-2000s economy car. We had our fun for a couple of months, but it was time to move on to bigger and better things.
Now those of you who have never tried to sell a car at the rock bottom of the market, I envy you. Priced at a (in my head) reasonable $2000 OBO, this thing was so incredibly hard to get rid of that we simply didn’t. Here’s a quick summary of our average interactions trying to sell the car on both Craigslist and Autotrader:
Autotrader had nearly no activity at all. I had the “Is this available?” and the spam calls, but there was nothing that would move the vehicle. On the Craigslist side, I had multiple people take a look at the car. I had a homeless man claim it wasn’t big enough to live in and might as well be scrapped (he offered $300), a kid told me the car had blown head gaskets (it didn’t), various joy rides, and multiple offers ranging from $100 – $500.
So what happened to the car? It was driven by my friend for a little while longer before being sent off to one of those charity auto auctions. No point in dealing with the low-ballers just to be insulted. That was the end of us trying to do that. I could have taken that car and made it my daily driver to get rid of my janky Miata, but I had come across another car that I appreciated much more…
Nice story. I’ve bought and sold multiple cars for less than $2000 and my experience in Stamford CT and now The Woodlands TX is better than yours. A $1200 Celica (exhaust muffler fell off when driving it home, then discovered rusted/leaking gas tank (fixed with boat fiberglass/epoxy) served me well as an “airport car” (Laguardia)…. before that I had a $1500 1978 Ford Fiesta – body perfect but needed engine rebuild when I sold it. These days there are plenty of High School new drivers who’s single Mom’s dont have much funds or workers needing transportation for landscaping jobs etc that snap up well maintained cars priced right. When it comes time to sell my 2012 Fiat 500 5-speed (daughters HS graduation car which I took over) the trick will be to offer free “how to drive a clutch” lesson as part of the sale.
Interesting. I guess I was hoping for a summary of what you learned from this experience, as I’m thinking that there were several teachable moments in this story…one which (speaking for myself at least) a number of us have probably encountered in our own journeys.
1) Flipping cars is a much better way to spend money than make money. I’d say that this is even more the case when the subject for flipping is a super-low spec 13 year old economy car in 2019. The lesson here is that as long as you’re only in it for the fun, have at it. I think you had fun?
2) Selling a car – or anything – via something like Craigslist is going to be more torture than enjoyment and in the end likely fruitless (or dangerous, but that’s another story). Craigslist was all joy 20 years ago, now not so much. It seems that FB Marketplace is following close behind CL in terms of becoming a total horror show. This (CL being a mess) seems to be somewhat tied to locality. I think that folks selling within a very small local community probably have better luck than those selling in larger more heavily populated areas.
3) Giving a car away is always an option, particularly when you have something like this Toyota that could provide basic transpo for someone truly in need. The manual transmission is/was a slight hindrance there, sadly. But maybe not for someone with a sense of adventure and even greater need. It sounds like you sort of had that going here…although you note in the end the car wound up as one of those tax donation things? I’d love to know what happened beyond that. Was it hacked up for parts immediately upon winding up at the salvage yard (I guess folks need 2006 Corolla parts), or was it rescued by a bidder and re-auctioned? I think most of the charity cars wind up in the crusher, unfortunately.
Finally, I wonder if your geographic location (California? Southern California?) affected your ability to sell it. It seems like a car like this Corolla – particularly if your photos are the actual car – could easily sell for $2000 in my area. But maybe that’s just my particular fantasy.
Oh, and I hope that your brother wound up ok coming from that Miata wreck. That looks pretty brutal.
Looking forward to hearing what comes next.
I’m a bit north of Southern California (Central Coast please, not Northern California 😀) but this car looks clean and Allan F said it functioned like new, so I would have thought it would be an easy sell. But then I remembered when we bought our Golf (only 2 years old, low mileage and no rust) back in 2017: the salesman told me that there wasn’t much market for manual transmission economy cars. If it had been a GTI, he said it would have sold much quicker. I got a good price and he was probably happy to see the car off the lot after several months. Even back in late 1993 when we bought our own stick shift Corolla, new, it was sitting forlorn on the lot surrounded by 1994 models, almost all automatics.
Technically, California’s exact north–south midway division is around 37°N, near the latitude of Morgan Hill and Chowchilla.
You’re North.
Craigslist just needs to go away. Nothing good ever happens dealing with it.
I beg to differ – I’ve bought 4 cars, at least 5 motorcycles and my current house off Craig’s List and had better experiences with all of those transactions than most when dealing with ‘sales professionals’
Of course, you need to have a certain set of expectations, be prepared to act fast when a potential deal materializes, and be well-enough informed to know when to buy and when to run.
Game on, in my book.
Rust, on a SoCal car? it must have spent most of its life elsewhere.
This was the last generation Corolla before it was severely decontented. And before it got bigger. I quite like these, and yes, they are golden in terms of cheap transport. I would of course have kept it, especially being a manual.
A friend of mine has a wagon that model it lives outside dirt road is never washed there is stuff growing on it but no rust, my daughter has a 03 one iof the very first of that model to arrive in appliance white has lichen in places but no rust, runs and drives really well, trade a rough one in over it it gets an African adventure afterlife, used Corolla 1.8 powertrains are a wanted item.
I’ve bought a car at the very bottom end of the market before. All I knew is that it had “less rust” than a different car I did have a single picture of that had “some rust.” It’s so hard to find a serious buyer (or seller) especially at that price.
In my town that car would sell at a premium and many would snap it up at $3.5k+. Its lower sized engine is the attraction as the annual road tax is low, and what’s not to like about 35-45mpg.
A friend drove his corolla for a few months with the engine check light on. Upon looking under the bonnet, I discovered he’d been driving with nearly zero engine oil for quite a few miles. These cars are (mostly) unbreakable.
His trusty steed was photographed and featured on a Honda hobby website this weekend. It’s definitely been photoshopped!
My daughter crashed her Corolla recently, I did a budget repair and hid the evidence, it made it past inspection so all good for another year, but I did look around for a replacement if they run and drive kosher rego and WOF $1k gets a beater grade heap with huge kms racked up, they are very good cars
In my book if you can even break even on a car like this you’re doing well. Even the W*****r D******s struggle with a free fully equipped workshop and free labour.
It’s kind of a dorky-looking over-tall bubbly little mid-aughts sedan, so it’s easy to forget how nice these Corollas were when new. Upholstery and plastics quality that would make a fairly expensive car of today blush, an engine that made it one of the quickest in the class, and a high level of ride and control refinement. Every once in a while Toyota allows the Lexus DNA to trickle back downstream.
I thought Corollas were high-demand and easy to sell used, but it looks like once anything gets down to a $2,000 price point it becomes undesirable.