I’ve recently reached the conclusion that sometimes, for some people, in some situations, the Toyota Corolla is the right car to recommend.
Categories:
Tag: toyota corolla
In January 2015, for the second consecutive month and the fourth time in the last six months, the Toyota Camry was not America’s best-selling passenger car.
But after holding the title in October and November – and the 2014 calendar year – the Camry ceded the crown to a sibling, not a rival, in January.
• Four top sellers post YOY improvements
• Hyundai held out of top 10
• Sixth-ranked Civic posts seventh consecutive decline
Sales of the Toyota Corolla jumped 20% to 27,357 units, 8658 more than the number of sales reported by the next-best-selling small car, Honda’s Civic.
I recently said “while there are other sporty coupes for not a lot of money, there aren’t many.”
The Scion tC was not one of the cars I had in mind.
Oh, it does its best to look its part, and I was surprised that I liked it as much as I did, but it’s no sport coupe.
It has become a Corolla Junkyard Find week, with this ’78 Corolla wagon on Monday and this skateboarder-enhanced ’98 Corolla LE sedan yesterday, so I’m going to keep the streak going with today’s find: a Late Malaise Era (yes, I invented the term) E-72 Corolla liftback, which I found late last year in Northern California. (Read More…)
After yesterday’s Corolla Junkyard Find, it seemed right to follow up with another, newer, Corolla. You know how you can tell when you’re a car’s final owner? Such was the case with the final owner of this much-abused Corolla, who drove his or her Corolla a couple thousand miles west, no doubt to be where cannabis is legal. (Read More…)
The third-gen Corolla was the car that made Toyota in the Unites States; you saw the occasional Corona or Celica and maybe a rare Crown once in a while before the mid-70s, but the 1974-79 Corolla was the first Toyota that sold in sufficient quantity to make the marque an everyday sight on American streets. These cars rusted fast east of the Rockies and— once they got to be 15 or so years old— weren’t worth fixing when they got ugly in the non-rusty parts of the country. That makes them fairly rare in junkyards today; in this series so far, we’ve seen this ’76 Corolla liftback and this ’74 Corolla two-door, and that’s about it prior to today’s find. (Read More…)
I feel fortunate enough that the first manual transmission car I ever drove was a 1986 Toyota Corolla GT-S. Yes, that Corolla. Although I am barely in my twenties, I learned how to drive a stickshift at a time when you could still pick up a ratty AE86 for a few hundred bucks.
Oh, California, the trend-setting coastal paradise that once sparked a revolution in the American car market. Fully half of cars sold in the Golden State are from Japanese brands, and for a couple of years, the top dog was the Toyota Prius – about as opposite as could be from the rest of the country, where the Ford F-Series reigns supreme. But there’s a new leader in the sales charts, and it’s a bit more mainstream (or “normcore” as the kids are saying these days).
Auris Touring Sports. Full gallery here.
In a post by our managing editor about that part of the European automotive market referred to as the “C segment”, what Americans would call compact cars, some of our readers commented on how “Toyota Corolla” means different things in different parts of the world. In Europe, Toyota sells a Corolla branded car based on its subcompact platform. The car that Toyota sells in Europe that is most comparable to the North American Corolla is called the Auris there. While built on the same platform, the Auris comes with a multilink independent rear suspension, while the U.S. spec Corolla gets a less sophisticated torsion beam setup in back. At the ride & drive for the launch of the 2014 Corolla that I attended a few months ago I asked Paul Holdridge, vice president of sales for Toyota Division, Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A, how come Europe gets IRS and we don’t. Holdridge said it had to do with differing driving styles, needs and expectations of American and European consumers. One might thing that means that American drivers don’t care that much about better handling, but it seems to me that the differences between the Auris and the U.S. spec Corolla may have more to do with the expectations of Europeans, than American driving styles.
Steve L., just a short note to thank you for your TTAC articles. They are my favorite at TTAC and I look forward to a new article each week.
Quick question: I noted in your last article you like some of the newer Mazdas. Can you tell me what new Mazda you would consider keeping for your own personal vehicle?
regards, Steve T.
The Other Steve Says:
Calling the Corolla “Toyota’s most important car” would be an understatement. This single model accounts for 38 percent of all Toyotas ever sold in the USA and they expect to shift 330,000 next year alone. If the sheer quantity wasn’t amazing enough, ponder this reality: 75% of sales will be split between just four different configurations. If you’re in a 2014 Corolla, the odds are about one in five that the Corolla next to you is identical save for paint color. Often derided by the automotive press as a “driving appliance,” is there more to the 2014 Corolla or is it just a toaster with wheels? Let’s find out.
Toyota may have become monumental on the basis of the midsize Camry’s popularity with American drivers over the past two decades, but that monument was built on the foundation of many, many compact Corollas. Before Lexus, before Camry, it was the Corolla that earned Toyota its reputation for reliability and quality construction. Forty million Corolla branded cars have been sold globally since the car’s introduction in 1968. For more than a generation, the conventional answer from both car enthusiasts and regular consumers alike, when asked to name a reliable small car, has been “Toyota Corolla”. Like Alfred Sloan proposed, Toyota knows that if you can capture car buyers when they are just entering the market, you can sell them a lot of cars over the course of their lives. While driving the latest Corolla isn’t on most car enthusiasts’ or automotive journalists’ bucket lists, the introduction of a new Corolla is indeed big news, at least as far as the car industry is concerned. Though the Honda Civic leads the segment in U.S. sales, the Corolla is close behind in second place and Toyota expects to sell about 300,000 Corollas this year. They’re hoping to increase that by 10% by selling cars to other than just traditional Corolla buyers, attracted by more exciting exterior styling and upgraded interior features. (Read More…)
I know it probably made perfect marketing sense for Toyota to piggyback their new subcompact’s image atop that of the fantastically successful Malaise Era Corolla, in spite of the fact that the two cars were unrelated other than having the same their parent company, but the confusion caused by the “Corolla Tercel” name persists to this day. For that reason, these cars always attract my attention when I see them in wrecking yards; in this series, we’ve seen this ’80 and this ’81 so far.
Toyota will drop the Matrix hatchback for 2014, leaving them without a compact hatchback. The Matrix, jointly developed with General Motors, never set the world on fire, and Toyota didn’t even break out its sales figures from the Corolla, making it tough to gauge its popularity. Perhaps we’ll get the much more attractive Corolla hatchback in the future.
Having driven quite a few mid-70s Corollas (these cars were as commonplace during my early driving years as are second-gen Tauruses today), I have to say that they were painfully slow even by the tolerant standards of the Middle Malaise Era. However, they were also shockingly reliable by the era’s standards, which means that these cars were still plentiful on the street until well into the 1990s. Since few outside a hard core of fanatics have shown much interest in pre-AE86 Corollas, these cars get scrapped as soon as something expensive breaks and/or the Rust Monster’s bites get too large. Here’s a Deluxe liftback that I found in a Colorado self-serve yard a few weeks back.
(Read More…)
Recent Comments