Junkyard Find: 1983 Toyota Cressida Station Wagon
It has taken a few decades, but Toyota Cressidas now show up at the big self-service wrecking yards in respectable numbers. I find these Lexus ancestors very interesting, so I shoot most of the ones I see; so far in this series, we have seen this ’80, this ’82, this ’83 wagon, this ’84, this ’84, this ’86 wagon, this ’87, this ’89, this ’90, and this ’92 (plus this ’79 and this ’86 wagon in my Junkyard Gems series).
Today’s Cressida is a zero-rust ’83 wagon in California.
264,248 miles, which isn’t very remarkable on a Cressida. Probably it still ran at the end, or it needed a $150 repair that the final owner didn’t consider justifiable for a 34-year-old beater.
For the 1983 model year, the Cressida received a bunch of Toyota Supra genetic material, including the very advanced (for the era) DOHC 5M-GE straight-six engine.
These horrible automatic seat belts were required on non-airbag-equipped US-market cars in the early 1990s, but Toyota included them voluntarily in these cars.
Toyota used some variation of this switch for decades in the automatic-equipped cars. My original Junkyard Boogaloo Boombox uses a Cressida ECT switch of this era to control the dual power antennas.
The word Cressida comes from the name of a character in a Shakespeare play.
In Japan, this car was known as the Mark II. Here we see the sedan pitched as a refined ride for a dignified and wealthy businessman.
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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Love the old square block steering wheels on these, like something from a bumper car. Also enjoy the super conservative old ads from Japan. Mr. Businessman with his briefcase and joyous, yet not overly expressive wife.
Boy I'm getting old. I thought this article was about the Toyota Crown wagon. A good friend of mine liked his so much that he bought a second one. Late 70"s I guess.