Junkyard Find: 1982 Toyota Corolla Liftback
It has become a Corolla Junkyard Find week, with this ’78 Corolla wagon on Monday and this skateboarder-enhanced ’98 Corolla LE sedan yesterday, so I’m going to keep the streak going with today’s find: a Late Malaise Era (yes, I invented the term) E-72 Corolla liftback, which I found late last year in Northern California.
You can tell when a junkyard car wasn’t towed away for unpaid tickets, because it will still have the keys. This was probably a trade-in at a sketchy used-car lot.
Most cars don’t rust in California, but Malaise Era Toyotas find a way. This car might have lived by the beach in San Francisco for a while, though not long enough to look like this terrifyingly salty ’84 Space Van.
The interior doesn’t look too bad here.
Just 69,000 miles? That suggests a blown head gasket followed by 20 years of storage in a driveway.
The 3T-C engine made just 70 horses, but they were reliable horses.
Come on!
The early 1980s were the pinnacle of the “Oh, what a feeling!” era for Toyota ads.
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.
More by Murilee Martin
Comments
Join the conversation
That these dissolved faster than orange Tang and still got respect shows that the Vega could have rejuvenated GM had they used a proper motor.
A cousin owned one like this , in a nice shade of yellow . Actually I liked the styling of the liftback of the prior generation Corolla better - when they came out the styling was compared to a Volvo 1800 . The above comments about head gasket problems reminded me of when my wife's 1982 Corolla blew its head gasket halfway between Houston and San Antonio on our way to a wedding . IIRC the car only had about 100k miles . Traded in on a Camry after the clutch went out a year later .