Junkyard Find: 1982 Toyota Cressida

Murilee Martin
by Murilee Martin

I always notice the Cressida when I see an example in a wrecking yard, and the last two years have seen a dramatic increase in the numbers of Toyota’s pre-Lexus rear-drive luxury sedan going to The Crusher. I suppose that means that the balance between real-world value and cost to fix mechanical problems has finally tilted against the Cressida. We’ve seen this ’80, this ’84, this ’87, this ’89, and this ’92 in the Junkyard Find Series so far, and now we’re going to go all Malaise Era with today’s ’82.

I found this car, in subdued Ignore Me Red, languishing in a Northern California self-service yard back in September.

Only 123,760 miles on the clock, which implies either long-term storage or a driving-to-church-on-Sundays-only long-term owner.

Toyota really needs to bring back emblems like this one.

The 5M-E L6 engine for 1982 made a respectable-for-its-day 116 horsepower. Yes, golf carts have more than that nowadays. What of it?

By 1990, just about every car had some form of electronic fuel injection. In 1982, however, EFI was still fairly exotic.








Murilee Martin
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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  • Acuraandy Acuraandy on Dec 06, 2012

    My kindergarten teacher had one of these in this color. Talk about a blast from the past...lulZ

  • Jayzwhiterabbit Jayzwhiterabbit on Dec 08, 2012

    Seriously, all these fond memories of a Cressida?!?? Wow, apparently my childhood wasn't as boring as I thought. Dude, people made fun of these cars when they were new....there was nothing "desirable" about a crappy Toyo Cressida back in the day. Wow!

  • CanadaCraig You can just imagine how quickly the tires are going to wear out on a 5,800 lbs AWD 2024 Dodge Charger.
  • Luke42 I tried FSD for a month in December 2022 on my Model Y and wasn’t impressed.The building-blocks were amazing but sum of the all of those amazing parts was about as useful as Honda Sensing in terms of reducing the driver’s workload.I have a list of fixes I need to see in Autopilot before I blow another $200 renting FSD. But I will try it for free for a month.I would love it if FSD v12 lived up to the hype and my mind were changed. But I have no reason to believe I might be wrong at this point, based on the reviews I’ve read so far. [shrug]. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it once I get to test it.
  • FormerFF We bought three new and one used car last year, so we won't be visiting any showrooms this year unless a meteor hits one of them. Sorry to hear that Mini has terminated the manual transmission, a Mini could be a fun car to drive with a stick.It appears that 2025 is going to see a significant decrease in the number of models that can be had with a stick. The used car we bought is a Mk 7 GTI with a six speed manual, and my younger daughter and I are enjoying it quite a lot. We'll be hanging on to it for many years.
  • Oberkanone Where is the value here? Magna is assembling the vehicles. The IP is not novel. Just buy the IP at bankruptcy stage for next to nothing.
  • Jalop1991 what, no Turbo trim?
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