1987 Toyota Tercel 2 door hatchback 1.5L
Summary:
A beater car for 100 teenagers
Faults:
This little car ran beautifully with absolutely no major problems. It had a few minor issues like the window rolling mechanism jumping off its track, and the parking brake cable becoming disconnected, but that's to be expected when a car is treated like toy.
Toward the end of its life (wait, it's still out there driving today), it needed an entire new exhaust system as the catalytic convertor failed. Any more driving and I'm sure the head gaskets would have gone next. Its bearings on the back wheels were close to needing a replacement, and something was acting up in the fuel line system, because the engine kept turning over when I turned off the ignition. Before making a decision on replacing all of these items, I just traded it in for my 2nd beater car, a 92 Honda Civic. (running like a champ, BTW).
Whoever is driving my old, fixed up Tercel is probably loving every minute of it.
General Comments:
This is the perfect beater car for someone just getting out of high school!! Treat a Tercel like crap and it will love you for it! I have run this thing on low dirty oil, rustic engine coolant, bald tires, and so much more. All I needed to do to fix these things was a spit shine on the front bumper.
Toyota knows that their cars may not be treated perfectly and their quality shines through for it.
I purchased this car for 800 bucks and ran it 161,000 miles with merely fluid replacements and tune ups. When the emissions tester came out with flashing red alarms saying my car was pumping out more hydrocarbons than a fleet of semis, I decided to call it quits with her.
Would you buy another car from this manufacturer? Yes
Review Date: 10th October, 2001
12th Sep 2002, 15:51
I have my mom's old 1988 tercel now that I've almost ruined it. I learned how to drive and care for a car with it. I lost two oil caps; both times spewing oil all over the engine. I never cleaned it off. The oil corroded everything made of rubber and destroyed the spark plug wires and caused the timing belt to break prematurely. This happened when I borrowed the car for an emergency ride to work. The broken timing belt damaged the valves, but we didn't know this right away. I later borrowed the car to drive to a concert about an hour away. I missed my exit and drove an extra forty-five minutes. I drove it in four, full throttle sprints, broken up by traffic patterns. Just before I turned around, the car's top speed decreased significantly and there was a rough, intermittent shaking from the front right. Also, the gas mileage had become terrible. I had no choice, but to continue back to the concert and have one of my friends follow me home, just in-case. As it turns out, my high-speed jaunt caused the imperfect valves to become faulty in one or two of the cylinders and the shaking was a broken motor mount. That Toyota Tercel drove for hours that night on two cylinders and a broken motor mount and the only problems were shaking in third gear and bad mileage. Go Toyota.