Junkyard Find: 1984 Toyota Cressida

by Murilee Martin

Published: August 31st, 2012

We’ve seen a totally Malaise-y early Cressida and a didn’t-know-they-built-them-so-recently Cressida in this series, but I’ve been scouring the self-serve yards for an example of the mid-80s rear-drive Toyota luxury sedans. Finally, here’s an ’84, complete with all manner of high-tech (for the time) features.

It’s very angular, in the manner of just about all Toyotas of the era, and looks so Japanese that you’d never mistake it for, say, a Cadillac or BMW.

The 156-horse 5M-GE DOHC six was the same engine that the Supra got. In fact, the Cressida and Supra of this era were very similar under the skin. 156 horsepower sounds weak now, but this was a pretty good number for 1984.

Toyota wasn’t about to let Mitsubishi and Nissan steal the future with the 300ZX’s and Cordia’s digital instrument clusters, and so the Cressida came up with this Toyota-fied (i.e., more conservative) “Electronic Display” for the Cressida.

Check out this flip-top “Trip Computer” in the center console!

And the analog climate-control system, which no doubt controls a complex system of vacuum-operated flapper valves.

I had forgotten the type of car that donated the power-antenna switch for the Junkyard Boogaloo Boombox, but now the mystery is solved!

The Lexus LS, which showed up a half-dozen years after this car (and overlapped with the later Cressida for its first couple of years), made the ’84 Cressida seem fairly crude. But still, this was a classy ride for the first year after the Malaise Era.

#1980s #1984 #1984ToyotaCressida #Cressida #Denver #DownOnTheJunkyard #Junkyard #JunkyardFind #Toyota #ToyotaCressida

Murilee Martin

Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.

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ARSAUTO on Jul 15, 2013

got an 84 Cressida for sale here. Not sure what to ask for it?? It runs and drives, but needs work. Any help?

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Guy922 on Mar 18, 2021

Looking at the interior pics of this car, I can see many similarities in a lot of the textures of the leathers and vinyls they used and how similar it is in a way to the 2004 Avalon I drive now. The more things change the more they stay the same I guess.

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