Junkyard Find: 1986 Toyota Tercel Station Wagon
The Toyota Sprinter Carib was sold as the Tercel Wagon in North America for the 1983 through 1987 model years, and most examples rolling out of American showrooms came with the more fuel-efficient front-wheel-drive setup. However, the four-wheel-drive Tercel Wagons held their value for decades after the front-wheel-drive ones depreciated into oblivion and were crushed, and thus I don’t see many of the latter type in wrecking yards these days.
Here’s a now-rare FWD ’86 that held on past age 30, spotted in a San Francisco Bay Area self-service yard.
In this series so far, we have seen a few of the four-wheel-drive Tercel Wagons, including this ’83 and this ’87.
I have owned a couple of examples apiece of the front- and four-wheel-drive Tercel wagons, and they were sturdy and amazingly capacious machines. Underpowered and featuring jouncy, tippy handling, sure, but still lovable. The blue ’85 in the photo above went on to become the legendary shark-fin-equipped Rockin’ Supercar, prior to finishing its days in the Oakland Pick-n-Pull.
Power came from a member of the many-branched Toyota A engine family: the 3A-C. Just 78 horsepower, but you had to work hard to kill this engine.
Better than 274k miles on the clock, which gets this Toyota into diesel Mercedes-Benz mileage territory.
This one has the rare air-conditioning option, actuated by one of my all-time favorite junkyard switches.
These Japan-market Sprinter Carib ads pitch the 4WD version, but they’re so good that I’m sharing them here.
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.
More by Murilee Martin
Comments
Join the conversation
These are pretty thin on the roads around here these days. We never got the FWD version in Australia, just the 4WD version. We got them between 1983-88. There were DLX and SR5 trims. I haven't seen a DLX trim in a while. These have excellent rear visibility and a very distinctive rear end. It's (spiritual) successor, the Corolla 4WD Wagon, sold in decent numbers but they have gotten a bit rarer in recent years.
Rear end looked like a microwave oven.