Junkyard Find: 1984 Toyota Corolla Hatchback, Spray-Foam Rust-Repair Edition
Let’s follow up 21st Century Junkyard Find Week and Volkswagen Junkyard Find Week with Rusty Junkyard Find week, shall we? On Tuesday, we saw this ’83 Toyota pickup with not-so-effective fiberglass-and-Bondo cover-up-the-rust-and-hope-it-goes-away repairs, and today we’ll be looking at a thoroughly used-up Corolla with similar squeeze-another-few-months-out-of-this-heap repairs done by someone who knew he or she would be the vehicle’s last owner.
Americans didn’t much like the look of the AE82 Corolla hatchback, although we bought a fair number of its NUMMI-built Chevy Nova siblings.
Does this rust mean that important structural components are likely to fail soon? You bet!
So close to that magical 300,000-mile mark, but another 38,868 miles in this hooptie would have been pretty miserable.
Even if the structure held together, there is no quantity or type of air freshener that could cover the stench of the fast-food-detritus-and-bodily-fluids-caked interior of this car.
Plus it’s a real hassle to have a hatchback with a nonfunctional hatch.
Crab Spirits is sure to find inspiration about this Corolla’s previous owner via the large number of stickers on the back glass. For example, he or she was a fan of Propaganda E-Liquid.
This retailer of smoking accessories also gets a shout-out on the Corolla’s rear glass.
You could get a diesel version of this car, but few did. Wikipedia editors believe that the 4A-LC engine was sold only in Australia, Switzerland, and Sweden, but you’ll see plenty of these two-digit-horsepower cockroaches in US-market Corollas.
US-market ads for Corollas and their kin seldom employed the word “sexy.”
San Franciscans— hundreds of them, lining the streets— doubted that the ’84 Corolla sedan could do anything.
John Davidson pitched a special New Zealand version of this car.
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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OMG, I hope you got a tetanus shot after photographing that. Secondly, you can actually kill them. Where I come from, one of these would have easily 500K kms, with maybe 2-3 rebuilts on the engine. How come you guys didn't get 3-point seat belts on the rear seats of these?
My buddy growing up had the Nova version, I think it was an 86. AM radio, crank windows special but the abuse this car took was legendary. Everything from hitting the ditch (repeatedly) in winter on the highways to seeing how slow we could go in 5th gear (@ 25km/h IIRC with the proper clutch feathering) - nothing could kill that car. Interestly enough his version diodn't rust too bad, maybe because its too cold in Winnipeg for road salt much of the winter.