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Welcome to Down On The Street , where we admire old vehicles found parked on the streets of the Island That Rust Forgot: Alameda, California. Remember when four-door hatch versions of small Japanese cars were commonplace? As we now know, the 80s were the last gasp for lengthened, four-door hatchback versions of Japanese subcompacts; once the minivans and SUVs took charge, the cold-eyed accountants at Toyota knew they wouldn't be making these things in quantity for much longer. In this case we've got a four-door hatch Corolla, fairly well beat up but still getting the groceries. Chevrolet sold a badge-engineered version of this car, built about 25 miles south of here and given the Nova name. You could also get a Fremont- built Corolla FX in the mid-to-late 80s. galleryPost('DOTS85CorollaWagon', 13, '1985 Toyota Corolla Station Wagon Down On The Alameda Street'); First 400 DOTS Vehicles • DOTS FAQ
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While we've put together our Top Car Ads for the 60s , 70s , 80s , and 90s , it still seems wrong so many great Toyota ads got overlooked. That's why we've got our favorite 20 here. Most are from North America, but Japan and Australia are represented as well. Naturally, the "Oh What A Feeling" era dominates our list. Enjoy! 1963 Crown 1979 Tercel 1980 Cresta 1981 Tercel 1981 SR5 Pickup 1981 Starlet 1981 All Models 1982 Corona 1982 Celica 1982 Celica 1983 Tercel 4WD 1983 Diesel Pickup 1984 Corolla 1984 All Models 1985 Tercel 4WD 1985 Trucks 1987 Celica 1987 Corolla FX 1987 Supra 1997 All Models
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newVideoPlayer("/87_Corolla_FX_494.flv", 506, 423,""); Everyone remembers the FX16 Corolla , but what about the plain ol' economical FX? It was the cheapest Corolla you could get, and the ones sold here were made in California… and it appears that most of them are still on the road today. Sure, that flat hatch looked hideous a little odd, but in an endearing sort of way.
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Welcome to Project Car Hell , where you choose your eternity by selecting the project that's the coolest... and the most hellish! After a 24 Hours Of LeMons race, I like to do a PCH pitting the #1 and #2 cars against each other, but this time it's going to be a bit different. You see, the #2 car in Houston was a 2nd-gen Camaro, and they're really easy projects- cheap, simple, and with ridiculously easy parts availability. That means we'll be going for a Japan-versus-Germany 80s Hot Hatch Challenge today, and you Camaro fans can console yourselves with the fact that you can fix most problems on your cars with a pipe wrench and zip-ties. For that matter, the Toyota Corolla FX16 is almost too reliable to show up here, but most of them spend their entire lives with the tach needle bouncing around the 8 grand mark and the body panels scraping telephone poles, with repairs performed by 19-year-old hoons with $9.98 Taiwanese socket sets and 12-packs of Steel Reserve to provide...
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The race is over and they're packing up the Traveling LeMons Circus now. The winner more or less led the race the entire time, flag to flag. To absolutely nobody's surprise, it's the Team SCHWING Toyota Corolla GT-S FX16, which avoided penalties, ran fast laps, and finished several laps in front of the #2 car (the Bikini Racer Camaro). I've got thousands of photos of the action to show y'all, but they'll have to wait until the carnies have packed the Tilt-A-Whirl back into the trailers. Check in during the week for further Yeehaw It's Texas LeMons madness!
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There was some grumbling over the choices in our last Choose Your Eternity challenge (which was won by the '77 Levis Edition AMC Hornet AMX by a healthy margin), ostensibly because they were too easy… but we know the real reason: being reminded of the Malaise Era brings up the uncomfortable parallels between the hard economic times then and those now . Of course, there are differences; sure, the current war is more expensive- in dollar terms- than was Vietnam, but inflation isn't the raging beast it was back then (though the bill for our 15-year debt binge looks to be just as painful as 20% inflation was). What we need is a flashback to Morning In America ! The 80s, when the Evil Empire was crumbling and Toyota still built cars that didn't hit you like a triple Valium with cough syrup chaser; yes, it's Corolla Time! As we all know, the problem with Japanese PCH cars is that parts are too easy to find, the build quality is too high, and Japanese engineers- particularly those...
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We saw an AE86 Toyota with Sprinter badging earlier in this series, and now I've found one with a single Trueno emblem just a few blocks away. This '85 seems to have had the US-spec front bumper replaced with a JDM assembly, but I'm pretty sure this car was originally sold in the US. It's always good to see an AE86 still driving, since most of these things have been thoroughly hooned by two generations of leadfooted import fanatics and they're getting mighty tough to find. It's been lowered a bit and sports the obligatory large exhaust tip, but overall it looks quite intact. Perhaps it spent the first 20 or so years of its life as a sedate daily driver. I saw quite a few of these emblems at the Motoring J Style show a month ago. Hey, do you think we'll start seeing Echos with Platz emblems? Avalons with Pronard badging? Yes, that's a NorCal Drift Academy T-shirt being used as a seat cover; let's hope the owner of this car keeps the body in one piece and...
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newVideoPlayer("84_Corolla_Japan_476.flv", 463, 387,""); Here's another in a long line of jittery Japanese-market car ads, this one showing how a pack of tie-wearing Toyota shoprats can whomp together an '84 Corolla for fashion-deranged monogloved chopsocky experts and fedora-wearing, flask-in-bottom-drawer newsies alike, all thanks to the mighty powers of the Munificent Plutonium Wrench.
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After reading Paul Niedermeyer's (aka PaulN's ) recent essay about the Corolla's 40th anniversary , it seemed only right for me to go with a Late Malaise Corolla for today's DOTS car. After all, the last generation of rear-wheel-drive Corollas really cemented Toyota's now utterly dominant reputation for reliability among North American car buyers, and sightings of these machines on the street have (finally) started to get somewhat rare. Even after 26 years, this car doesn't look all that archaic. Nothing flashy, but also not Toyota Bland (the seriously bland Toyotas came a bit later). <<img alt="82_Corolla_Rr_LH.jpg" src="http://jalopnik.com/assets/resources/2008/03/82_Corolla_Rr_LH.jpg" width="478" height="266" /> Some of these cars are getting hooned drifted to death nowadays, but not in anywhere near the numbers of their younger AE86 brethren. It's sad to think that we won't see many of these Corollas on...
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We saw a rear-drive Corolla GT-S a few months ago, but we haven't yet seen one of the front-drivers. Things involving the Corolla name in North America got a little confused in the mid-80s, what with the different platforms available at the same time and then the Corolla-clone Nova (and Toyota-branded Corollas as well) being built in California . The AE86 gets all the attention from the donuts-in-mall-parking-lot kids these days, which may be why even rarer GT-S FX16s like this one survive as reasonably original daily drivers. Decal emblems? Plastic crypto-racy side trim? Paint the color of Cyndi Lauper's lipstick? Welcome to the 80s! I spotted this car on the same East End block as the '82 Mercedes-Benz 380SL and a couple of DOTS cars I haven't posted yet, so we're talking about a DOTS gold mine second only to the block with the Morris Minor convertible , '69 Cutlass convertible , '47 Plymouth , and '54 Ford . I've always thought this vent/window arrangement...
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I know it's been a while since our last Choose Your Eternity matchup (in which, incidentally, the Hayubasa-powered Honda 600 just barely edged out the Duramax-powered '47 Ford , for which I apologize; the cruel overlords at the salt mine my tech-writing job shipped me out to New York for a 4-day weekend of PowerPoint presentations. Aaah, PowerPoint, the magical tool that makes time slow to a crawl! To unwind, we were treated to free booze each night at corporate-sponsored parties, including one with an "Eighties Prom" theme. And, as I fought my way to the bar to get another French 75 (F. Scott Fitzgerald's drink of choice while in Paris), contemplating the spectacle of a bunch of 24-year-old software geeks shakin' it to the usual Billy Idol tunes (how come 80s parties never have good 80s dance music, like George Clinton or Grandmaster Flash? And, yes, I know the answer: MTV), I tried to recall how the rear-wheel-drive Japanese factory hot rods of the era appeared...
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newVideoPlayer("84_SuperToyotaMan_476.flv", 475, 376); Back in 1984, car-shopping Aussies might consider a V8-powered ute, but what if the gears of industrial society stopped turning and the juice stopped flowing? Why, they'd be burning up too much fuel roaring about the wasteland in gas-sucking bombs - better to go for the reliability and fuel economy of a Corona or Corolla! Once Super Toyota Man offered you a $250 government grant, all you'd need to do would be to check the box for the Quad Crossbow option and you'd be ready to roll!
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