1980 Toyota Tercel - New Think

This...is a 1980 Toyota Tercel. How I disdained it when it was new. I was hooked on bigger-is-better, over-styled, rumbling V-8 powered, two-ton plus gas guzzlers. Eight, nine, ten miles per gallon? This is America, kid, and that's the way we do things here. Well, honestly, that sentiment was fine until I started driving and realized how difficult the big domestics were to handle and how expensive filling up a twenty plus gallon gas tank was on a car that couldn't go much more than two hundred miles on a fill up. I also had no idea how utterly frustrating constant break downs could be. I had so much to learn. Oh, so much.

Hard to believe but prior to 1980 Toyota did not sell a front-wheel-drive automobile in the United States. Honda, Subaru and even Datsun (Nissan) did but Toyota? No. And when they finally did come out with a front driver in 1980, they did it differently than anyone else. Well, different than the other Japanese makes.

While having an interior just as space efficient as the others, Toyota eschewed the growing conventional sentiment of driving the front wheels via a transverse mounted engine and unequal length "half-shafts". It may have looked like a rear wheel driver from inside the engine room but our Tercel has a power train with more in common with a then current Cadillac Eldorado and it's "unitized power package" than a Honda Accord or Datsun 310.

Unless we're able to pin down a Toyota engineer who helped design this power train, we'll never know for sure why they went longitudinal with the mounting of Tercel's engine. One could surmise it was a safer engineering bet than going "all-in" with an all new trans-mounted design. Toyota was then as they are now, a very conservative company and slow to adapt "new-think". Thing is, while they've always been slow to move, they're always moving forward. And a benefit to this engine mounting was in for 1983, when they rolled out an all wheel drive model, all they had to do was throw on a drive shaft out the back of the transmission. As if it things like that were ever that simple.

Toyota was also so concerned that the buying public would be incredulous towards a new model that they festooned "Corolla" on 1980 and 1981 Tercel's so it would appear it was a sub-brand of Corolla. A model that by 1980 had achieved near iconic status in a gas starved America.

Would one of these ever appear in my "Jay Leno" fantasy garage? Oh, hell no. However, if I was to be the curator of an automobile museum, one of these along with an early Civic, Datsun F-10 and Subaru GL most certainly would be as they represent the apex of automotive engineering in the late 1970's and early 1980's.