Toyota’s Corolla hasn’t been particularly interesting in years. Today’s Nice Price or No Dice AllTrac, however, is old enough to raise an eyebrow or two. Let’s see if its price can do the same.
With only about 3,000 ever sold, yesterday’s 2004 Lexus IS300 SportCross is not a car that you’d be tipping your hat to on every street corner or motor court.
That relative rarity had many of you conflicted over what such a car might reasonably cost. In the end, a narrow majority of you thought that the Lexus’s $9,800 asking price wasn’t that sum, and the car fell in a 54 percent No Dice loss.
For some inscrutable reason known only to the tea leaves, we’ve had a lot of wagons on the show this week. One was a 4WD SUV wagon, while the Lexus we featured yesterday was kind of a sporty Japanese wagonette. Today we’re going to close the week with a car that bridges those two concepts adroitly.
Like yesterday’s Lexus, this 1992 Toyota Corolla All-Trac is a car that many of you may not even know existed. It being a Corolla, some of you may very well not care. That’s too bad though, because before the SUV and crossover era, Toyota pumped a lot of time and money into its Corolla range, and the result was some laudably interesting cars.
Toyota’s current Corolla may come in just a single body style and as FWD only, but back when this All-Trac was conceived and constructed, the Corolla line was no less than four distinct body styles of which fully two were wagons. The All-Trac wagon differed from the FWD Corolla longroof with taller, more distinctive bodywork. This car was intended to replace the fun and funky Tercel 4WD and carried some of that car’s vibe in its looks.
This one comes with 158,000 miles of experience and a new coat of dark teal paint on that model-unique bodywork. The metal beneath that new topcoat looks to be without issue, and the whole thing rides on a set of 18-inch wheels that, while inoffensive in design, do appear to be two sizes too large for the car.
The cabin looks to be a comfortable, if somewhat spartan, space. The cloth seats don’t look appreciably worn, and the car even carries its original factory AM/FM/cassette stereo unit in the dash. On the downside, this is a car from the mouse-belt era and those door-mounted shoulder belts can be a pain in the neck (literally) as they lack any sort of height adjustment.
This being a Toyota of a certain age, you might expect it to be mechanically sound. That seems to be the case, however the seller does note a number of maintenance chores and repairs undertaken recently. Those include a new catalytic converter and the exhaust after that, a new battery and distributor, as well as new axles up front. The rear end is a solid axle on coils so there’s not much to go wrong with that. A previous owner did the timing belt and water pump, so those should be good for a few miles more.
Other mechanical specs to note are the car’s 1.6-liter engine and five-speed manual gearbox. With double overhead cams and 16 valves, the fuel-injected four is modern enough, even if it makes only 102 horsepower. The five-speed and push-button on-demand AWD help make the most of those ponies.
The seller says the car has had a three-owner life and that the sale is forced because his wife wants “something bigger.” The title is clean and the car is claimed to “need nothing” and be “ready to go.” How ready are you to weigh in on this Corolla’s $5,950 asking price? Ready enough, I hope.
What do you think, could this “classic Corolla” be worth its $5,950 asking as it sits? Or, despite this being one of the more interesting Corollas ever offered, does that price elicit from you nothing more than yawns?
You decide!
Portland, Oregon, Craigslist, or go here if the ad disappears.
H/T to Bill Floyd for the hookup!
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