@Barkydog The acceleration times for that '73 Corolla were abysmal. We called it the Toy for good reason.
My standing joke remains that it had an overworked four-hamster engine. Poor little creatures could run their hamster wheels only so fast and far before needing a breather.
Best gas mileage I’ve ever had on any car was descending the western side of the Alleghany mountains in PA when moving from NJ back to OK with the Toy fully packed with my worldly possessions. I got an astonishing 42 mpg on that tank of gas.
Of course, flogging the hamsters uphill on the eastern side of the mountains was rather dismally less mpg and very s.l.o.w. going straining uphill.
Yup!
Somehow, in all of the nostalgia for the old beetle, some folks have forgotten that–relative to their weight and low power output–they weren’t really as economical as a much-faster modern econobox.
You can say that about ANY vehicle from that era. Hell - My wife’s 2007 Lexus ES-350 has more power, better gas mileage, better handling, more comfortable , weighs 1000lbs+ more, pollutes less, and 100 times more reliable then my 1972 Vega (which was considered an economy vehicle back then).
I’ve owned 5 Toyota’s kept them all at least 10 years. I replaced a muffler on one. Everything else was maintenance. I also had an Accord and a Mercury Villager. They also were mine for more than 10 years. The Villager had problems with the cruise control.
How you drive, and where has a lot to do with how long a car lasts.
Yes, maintenance is key, along with how one drives, but there is no avoiding the reality that Toyota sold vehicles with badly-flawed engines for several years, and those vehicles consumed a LOT of oil. Their 2AZ-FE 2.4 liter 4 cylinder engines (circa 2007-2009) had badly-designed piston rings, and that led to very high oil consumption.
By the time that my friend dumped his 2008 Rav-4, it was consuming 1 qt of oil every 300 miles.
And, that 120k mile vehicle had been consistently maintained better than was specified by Toyota.
Sorry, I stand corrected. In Canada the Pontiac and the Chevy were built on the same assembly line and were mechanically the same. The powertrains were identical.
Say it ain’t so Doc. So one has to ask why would they discontinue Pontiac since some of us would not want a Chevy badge in the garage but Pontiac would be fine. Why go to all the fuss about eliminating a brand when all they had to do is save some name plates and slap a Pontiac plate on a Chevy to make some of us happy?
@bing When I was in my first round of graduate school, one of my fellow graduate assistants was from Canada and had a brand new 1963 Pontiac. It had the Chevrolet 283 cu in V8 engine and the two speed Chevrolet Powerglide automatic transmission.
As I remember, the pickup trucks made by Chrysler corp. were called Fargo rather than Dodge. The Dodge passenger cars were rebadged Plymouths back then.
The small Canadian market in the 50s dictated that it did not pay to have a separate Pontiac brand, other than by badge engineering.
I toured the GM plant in 1960 and saw Chevies and Pontiacs coming off the same assembly line. Quite a feat!
Later with the Auto Pact, Canadian plants built just a few models and imported the rest from the USA. The only difference was safety and emission specs.
Eventually the Canadian plant built just one model for all of North America; currently the plant is shut down and will focus on electric vehicles. Your future electric Chevy may be built in Canada.
Had an '89 Corolla, bought used. Had the carburetor that used the ECU to run and past 110K miles kept having issues with the solenoids. Mechanics didn’t want to work on it, so I would fix it here and there. The 3 speed automatic was not good and its differential was also shot at 140K miles. It got rusty and with all the issues, it was junked at 145K Miles in 2006.
I have had some good Toyota’s (92 Camry, manual, 2005 Camry) and some not so good. The most recent one was a CPO 2018 RAV4 that had a noisy engine and the torque converter shudder. I had many visits and the dealer finally bought the car back minus sales tax/registration. I cut my losses.
At this point I buy what I like, just stay away from the bottom of the list as much as possible. That is probably Jeep/FCA and Mini along with Euro brands.
Here is one for anyone in the Canadian vs US assembled vehicles. I don’t know if this car was real or not. Advertised as a 1959 Dodge from Canada, front sheet metal 59 Dodge, from the A pillar back 59 Plymouth sheet metal, had a Flathead 6.
It probably was. A lot of Mopar’s Canadian models had Plymouth sheet metal on one end, and Dodge sheet metal on the other. A few months ago, Hemming’s Classic Car magazine featured a Canadian Valiant that had Dart sheet metal in the rear.
Or… was it a Canadian Dart that had Valiant sheet metal on the front? Either way, it was an amalgam of Valiant and Dart.
There was also a Mercury truck made in Canada other than the name it looked like a Ford of the same year. I don’t know what all year’s dodge truck’s were made in Canada but my 82 is one. I also seem to remember reading somewhere that when pllhips head screw’s was first used in cars they were made in Canada
Even if you’re just re-badging cars, you still have to spend a bunch of money marketing two divisions instead of one if you want to keep them as separate brand identities. They probably reached the conclusion that there weren’t enough people who saw a material difference between Pontiac and Chevy to bother keeping Pontiac. Especially since Pontiac was more expensive for the same car in the badge-flipped ones.
The shame of it was that Pontiac was doing some cool stuff at the end there, importing Holdens that we otherwise couldn’t get here in the G8 and GTO. Of course, I don’t remember them ever actually advertising what those cars really were, so a lot of people probably just assumed they were just more run of the mill rebadged Chevys.
Speaking of rebadging, in 1958, the Packard distributor in Argentina made a deal with Studebaker to sell him a bunch of pickups with the Packard name on them.
Speaking of Studebaker truck’s I don’ remember what year I think early to mid 50’s was the first one I had to step on the clutch to start not because of a safety switch but the starter button was under the clutch.
