Junkyard Find: 1980 Toyota Corolla Station Wagon
The fourth-generation Corolla was a gigantic sales success in California, but you won’t see many of these TE72 wagons even in rust-free regions these days; nearly all of them were driven into the ground and replaced by RAV4s or Priuses a decade or two back.
Since we had wagon Junkyard Finds on Monday and Wednesday, let’s make this a Junkyard Wagon Week with this third one!
The 3T engine was a 1,770cc pushrod unit that made just 70 horses in California-emissions-spec 3T-C form. On the plus side, the 3T sipped gas and was nearly impossible for even oil-change-deferring Americans to kill.
The drift kids like these cars, because they’re cheaper than the AE86 Corollas but are still rear-wheel-drive and can take a variety of stupid engine swaps (or stupid boost on the 3T-C).
This one is a longtime San Francisco Bay Area resident, with a 2001 Cal State Hayward (the name was changed to Cal State East Bay a few years ago, which was a real diss to the people of Hayward) sticker next to a bunch of $200-ticket-if-you-don’t-have-one City of Berkeley residential parking permits.
Yamaha, Kawasaki, and the San Francisco Opera all get bumper-sticker shout-outs, right next to the bought-from-a-street-vendor-on-Telegraph-Avenue-in-1983 QUESTION AUTHORITY sticker.
A 24 Hours of LeMons team is assembling a TE72 for the Arizona race next month, so I grabbed this car’s allegedly-hard-to-find distributor for them.
Even in Australia, the TE72 wagon was special.
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 owned a bunch of Toyotas throughout the 90's including a Corona, two Celicas, and a couple of these - one just like the one in the photos (!), and one two-door SR-5 Liftback in that burnt orange color that they sold so many of them in: bit.ly/20ZNpLC. I will always love that SR-5. Despite being a rag bag, it is to this day my favorite car that I've ever owned. It had excellent weight distribution, a 5-speed and you could tach it until the valves floated. I would tear down twisty dirt roads in the boonies at ridiculous speeds, and let the tail hang out at every opportunity. The rust cancer finally got it - it went to the junkyard still running. By the way, being the favorite car I've ever owned is no joke. I've had cars from every automaker and decade from 1970 to the present. This includes many years of BMW's including a couple of E30s (one a swap car) and an E36, a heavily modified AMG Mercedes-Benz, and a host of American muscle. I still wish I had that SR-5. Only not as a tired rust heap.
Hope you got some shots of that first-gen Integra next to the Corolla. I have great memories of mine.