Junkyard Find: 1971 Toyota Corona Mark II

Murilee Martin
by Murilee Martin

My first car was a beige ’69 Corona sedan, and so I’m always happy to see a junkyard Corona. In this series prior to today, we’ve seen this ’66 sedan, this ’68 sedan, this ’70 sedan, this ’70 coupe, plus this Corona ad from the February 1969 issue of Playboy. Now I’ve found a Corona Mark II at a Denver yard.

Featuring overhead-cam 8R power, the Corona Mark II coupe had a respectable 108 horses under the hood.

Bucket seats, four-on-the-floor, $2,280 MSRP— not a bad deal, especially considering that the ’71 Chevrolet Vega coupe listed at a mere 84 bucks less. The ’71 AMC Gremlin was just $1,899, though, and a (surprisingly comfortable but way less well-appointed than the Corona) Simca 1204 could be had for $1,693.

These cars rusted with great eagerness, even in dry places like Colorado, and this one is no exception. Not worth restoring (in 2014), but still interesting.

The claim of 25 miles per gallon was more believable than most of the era.







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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  • Hebert Hebert on Sep 05, 2022

    Hello my friend I would like to know if you have the internal handles to sell. I am restauring a car like this in Brazil and I can't find the internal handles here. Thanks

  • Konstdinos Seitans Konstdinos Seitans on May 22, 2023

    where is the car i won't the wind shield

  • Rochester "better than Vinfast" is a pretty low bar.
  • TheMrFreeze That new Ferrari looks nice but other than that, nothing.And VW having to put an air-cooled Beetle in its display to try and make the ID.Buzz look cool makes this classic VW owner sad 😢
  • Wolfwagen Is it me or have auto shows just turned to meh? To me, there isn't much excitement anymore. it's like we have hit a second malaise era. Every new vehicle is some cookie-cutter CUV. No cutting-edge designs. No talk of any great powertrains, or technological achievements. It's sort of expected with the push to EVs but there is no news on that front either. No new battery tech, no new charging tech. Nothing.
  • 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.
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