Junkyard Find: 1985 Toyota Camry LE Liftback
I thought I’d seen the rarest member of the Camry species in North America when I spotted this 1990 Camry All-Trac on the coldest day I’ve ever experienced in a junkyard. Perhaps I was wrong. Here’s one of the very few first-gen Camry liftbacks sold in this country, now Crusher- bound.
331,120 miles on the clock, or an average of 11,825 miles per year.
The cavernous hatch makes this into something like a very large Corolla, and maybe that’s what made nearly all the Camry shoppers go for sedans.
It’s got some rust and the interior is pretty grimy, but this car is in good shape for something that has racked up twice the miles of most 80s Japanese cars you see in wrecking yards.
Toyota made the S engine until just a few years ago. While we’ve seen plenty of S engines fail dramatically in the 24 Hours of LeMons, they hold together very well on the street.
Will these cars ever have any collector value? It’s too early to tell.
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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Waiting for a red light in Pasadena , Ca. last night , a poop brown one rolled up next to me with Granpa driving and Grandma riding shotgun . It was as clean as you'll fine , decent original paint and chrome etc. , ran nice too . -Nate
heheh . Brown was the defining 80s car color, just like pu-eer avacado green was for the 70s