Junkyard Find: 1986 Toyota Tercel Wagon
Used-up examples of the 1983-1987 Toyota Tercel wagon (known as the Sprinter Carib in its homeland) still show up in junkyards today, but nearly all of them are the four-wheel-drive versions; the humble front-wheel-drive ones weren’t as desirable (once they became beaters, hoopties, and/or buckets) and mostly got crushed a decade ago.
Here’s an ’86 in a Silicon Valley self-service wrecking yard.
These door graphics must be original, but I’ve never seen them on any other Tercel. Perhaps a dealer-installed option.
These Tercels are among the most long-lived of 1980s cars, which is impressive given how cheap they were when new. They weren’t anywhere near as much fun to drive as their (also quite cheap) Honda Civic contemporaries, but I have owned a few Tercel wagons and I developed real affection for them.
78 horses, and it uses them all.
This one is unusual in that the original purchaser ordered air conditioning; generally, any Toyota wagon shopper willing to spring for AC could have been persuaded to step up to the bigger and more luxurious Corolla. This is the button to install on your guitar amp, if you’re a big fan of the Minutemen and want to Jam Econo.
While the engines in these cars had longitudinal mounting, they drove the front wheels (for the four-wheel-drive version, a shaft went out the back of the transaxle to the rear differential). You can remove the Tercel FWD’s transmission from the differential by disconnecting the shifter linkage and four big bolts, then sliding the transmission back off the input and output shafts — I’ve done this job in the junkyard in ten minutes, which I had to do after buying a $50 police-auction Tercel and finding first and second gears absent. Sadly, replacing the clutch requires removal of the differential housing (in practice, this means pulling the engine with it).
Yeah, this is the Japanese-market ad for the 4WD version, but so what? It’s amazing!
It appears that nearly all of the global marketing money for the Tercel wagon/Sprinter Carib went into the 4WD version.
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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I had a 1983 and it was horrible. It wouldn't start half the time, nobody could figure out why (many things were tried). Every part was 2-3x more expensive than for most other cars, and the 4wd locked in randomly on the road at speed which caused an accident. It had far less miles than this one, and I was very happy to see it go. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Despite what others who have an obvious agenda say, these things were super reliable vehicles that were beaten on and misused and lived waaaay past their prime. Usually the only thing that killed them was rust.