My first car was a 1977 Toyota Corolla.
To say that it was a stripped down little crapbox would be an insult to crapboxes everywhere. It weighed about as much as I do, had a tiny motor that would have looked right at home on a lawnmower, didn't have a radio, and was painted the same unfortunate color as Guilden's Spicy Brown Mustard. It was a two-door, but otherwise it looked a lot like this.

It was originally bought by a girl whose father was determined that she not spend one extra dollar on her first new car, so it was the Super Economy version. It had a manual choke, a stick shift, had more plastic inside it than Pamela Anderson, and a rear wheel drive for extra excitement in the snow.

Despite all of this, it turned out to be unkillable.

The beauty of having something so absolutely stripped down is that if anything goes wrong it's easy to fix. The clutch slipping? Well, instead of a hydraulic clutch it had a cable held in place with a C-clip so you could basically yank on the cable and reposition the clip to adjust the clutch. The radiator cracked? You could easily get to all of the bolts, so I replaced it with one that I scrounged out of a junkyard. The door smashed in and the seat ripped? Off to the junkyard I went.

I drove that car improbable distances, though terrible weather, over logging roads and other bad conditions, and it chugged along like a patient old mule. I put bags of sand in the trunk during the winter to give it some semblance of traction, and learned to slide through turns like the Dukes of Hazzard.

One night as I was driving along an expressway I decided to ride in the slipstream of the trucks that were roaring along there. For those who don't know, if you get right behind a lorry you can get into the partial vacuum they cause when they push the air out of the way. You have to stick close to them, but if you do this the fuel efficiency of your car increases dramatically. In my case it about doubled as the car was so light. I spotted an approaching tuck in my rear view and swung out behind it.

The only problem was that it was going somewhere close to 90 mph, so when I did this my car was sucked in like a plastic bag.

I pushed in the clutch and coasted, and was being pulled fast toward his bumper. I put it back in gear and let out the clutch, and the car made a sound like a furious cat trapped in a box. The entire car was shaking and I realized that the rust that held it together wasn't going to survive this, so I hit the brakes and dropped out of the slipstream.

A bit of research later I found out that that particular car had a governor on the transmission that limited it to 80 mph max. Had I stayed in the slipstream the transmission would have probably been spread out over a couple of miles of highway.

But, like a good old pack mule, it forgave me and served me for another three years before I sold it in favor of a VW Dasher diesel. I hear it ran for another couple of years after that.

Not bad for a $500 junker.
( Wanderer, Thu 22 Apr 2010, 18:19, 2 replies)

Sand
I was always under the impression that Toyota Corollas were only made with front wheel drive and therefore putting sand in the back would make the handling worse.

I bow to your experience though...
(Suck it and Sea, Thu 22 Apr 2010, 19:19, closed)

Maybe over there
but this one was definitely rear-wheel drive. I got to the point where I could easily get it to pivot on its front wheels, with the back end spraying snow as it swung around.
( Wanderer, Thu 22 Apr 2010, 19:46, closed)