Junkyard Find: 1988 Toyota Tercel EZ
The Tercel EZ sold about as well as the Plymouth Sundance America, Chevrolet Chevette Scooter, and the other zero-frills cars of the 1985-1995 period, i.e., very poorly. Jack Baruth does a fine job of explaining why this is so, but enough of these cars were moved off showroom floors that you still see the occasional example. Here’s a Tercel EZ that I spotted in my local self-serve wrecking yard.
Yes, that’s 315,300 miles on the clock. Third-gen Tercels were never much fun to drive, but they were incredibly competent transportation appliances.
The interior of this one was just about completely used up by the time it got to The Crusher’s waiting room, and there’s no point in spending any real money to get new carpets and upholstery for a lowly Tercel EZ.
I’ve owned several third-gen Tercels, including an EZ, and their simplicity made the Corolla seem frivolous. Nobody ever really loved one of these cars, though, in contrast to the equally slow but personality-fortified second-gen Tercel.
A lot of LeMons fans couldn’t understand why a Tercel EZ finishing tenth out of 100 entries was such a spectacular accomplishment. Drive an EZ for ten minutes and you’ll get it.
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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Everything is relative. My state highway department had a couple '80s Tercels, and they were MUCH preferred over the newer Geo Metro models. All were manuals while all the Metros were automatics. You had to kick down the Metro to first to get up a freeway ramp, and you spent more time in the breakdown lane accelerating to merge than the the Tercel. If work was being done in the median, engineers just didn't go there in either the Tercel or the Metro - merging with fast lane traffic was too hazardous.
They say Tercel Owens was great in San Fran, but when he went to Philly and Dallas he was a cancer in the locker room. People mock 'Touareg' and 'Tiguan'...what the heck is a 'Tercel'?