Toyota Tercel – Driven To Write

Que Sera Sera

The Sera, one of Toyota’s more eccentric creations, is thirty this year. DTW remembers it and wonders what inspires the conservative Japanese automotive giant to go off-piste like this, as it has done regularly in the past.

For me, Toyota Motor Corporation has always been something of an enigma. Ostensibly, it is a deeply conservative and risk-averse company. For more than eighty years, it has meticulously and systematically developed its mainstream vehicles to align exactly with its customers’ evolving expectations. Whether you drive a Corolla, or are driven in a Century, you can be confident that the replacement model, when it arrives, will always be essentially similar and comfortably familiar, but just a little bit better.

Toyota has often been a late adopter of new technologies, such as front-wheel-drive*, happy to Continue reading “Que Sera Sera”

Weekend Reissue : Desio via Toyota City

Another toe in the water exercise from a not so different automotive monolith.

Despite the differences in culture and in product ethos, there really wasn’t a tremendous difference between Fiat Auto and Toyota – apart that is from the minor matter of the two companies’ relative governance and latterday fortunes. But certainly, before Fiat completely lost the run of itself, the two entities probably had more in common than we might have first realised. Continue reading “Weekend Reissue : Desio via Toyota City”

Theme : Japan – The Giant Finally Moves Forward

How Toyota finally put the horse before the cart in what was, in one sense at least, a bit of a Triumph.

Spot The Difference - image : japanclassic.ru — Spot The Difference – image : japanclassic.ru

Despite promises of Waku-Doki and its work with EVs, Toyota remains in many ways a cautious company. Once I might have said this with a tinge of contempt, but certainly not now. The motor industry is a dangerous business, yet Toyota has survived and prospered because, generally, they know exactly what they are doing.

By the end of the 1960s, it was clear that front wheel drive was no fad. Even GM had started dabbling with it in, of all things, the 7 litre Oldsmobile Toronado. In Japan, Subaru had produced its 1000 in 1966, Honda the N360 in 1967 and Nissan the E10 Cherry in 1970. But Toyota waited. And waited. Finally, in 1978, Toyota revealed its toe-in-the-water exercise in front wheel drive, the Tercel. Naturally they had been biding their time, assessing the various forays into FWD by other manufacturers.

Would they Continue reading “Theme : Japan – The Giant Finally Moves Forward”