I have a thing for the 4th gen Corolla. Unlike the 3rd, it actually looks good. I had a lot of seat time in the wagon version as a kid, so it’s a car that presses the nostalgia button. And it was the last gasp of the original RWD platform, which has to count for something.
About that last thing: it may be hard for us car nerds to believe, but there are people out there who claim, with a straight face, that the Corolla is “the most produced car in the world,” with “over 50 million units made since 1966” and all that. The Corolla’s Japanese Wikipedia entry says this right in the intro. Not gonna hide the fact that, as I was giving it a look to brush up on E70 basics, that passage kind of triggered me.
Fifty million and counting, eh? Why, that’s a lot more than the VW Beetle, the various iterations of the Fiat 124 or the Ford Model T. But it’s like saying the Mercedes 220 has been in continuous production since 1951. “Corolla” is a nameplate. The Beetle, the Model T and the 124 are actual models. The car featured here, for instance, has literally zero common parts with present-day Corollas.
There should be some gen 1 bits left over in this 4th gen car. For one thing, the smallest available engine on the E70, the K-series 1.3 litre, was a direct descendant of the 1.1 pioneered on the first Corollas. The 1.5 in our feature car is a newer engine though. However, the basic suspension layout (MacPherson struts up front and live axle in the back) was also common to all Corollas up to that point.
However, our feature car here, being a high-spec saloon, was granted a fancy new multilink and coils rear suspension, rather than its more basic siblings (and all vans/wagons), which kept the old cart springs. So it’s not even clear that the E70 saloon in this post has any direct DNA link to the ‘60s.
Broadly speaking, it could be said that the vast Corolla nameplate went through three epochs and is currently in its fourth. The first was the RWD era (gens 1 through 4, 1966-1983), the FWD era (gens 5 through 8, 1983-2000), the narrow/wide era (gens 9 through 11, 2000-2018) and today’s 12th generation, which might be called the Prius era. The first two are fairly self-explanatory, but the third merits a bit of clarification: from gen 9, Toyota made two Corollas, a narrower JDM version and a wider global one. This is still the case with gen 12, but the difference is much less noticeable now that the platform is shared with the Prius. Essentially, Japan adopted the wide version as of 2018.
Of course, these “eras” are a less clear-cut in their timeline than I made it appear. It took a long while for the RWD era to bow out, for instance: saloons switched over to the front-drive E80 platform in May 1983, but the RWD E70 van/wagon, as well as the legendary AE85/86 Corolla Levin/Sprinter Trueno coupés, kept the E70 bones alive and kicking till mid-1987.
The Corolla was (and still is) a highly successful and very complex family of cars, one of the great nameplates in automotive history. But adding up every one ever made is like totting up apples, oranges and a whole fruit salad’s worth of other produce.
As regards this E70 saloon, with its clean-cut, slightly Euro-infused design and DOHC engine, it’s one of the coolest JDM family haulers of its time. Definitely in my top three Corolla generations – well above both its unsavoury predecessor and rather bland successor. The first era ended on a high!
Related posts:
Curbside Classics: 1980 – 1983 Toyota Corolla – The Datsun 510 Doppelgänger, by David Saunders
Curbside Classic: 41 Years Of 1980 Toyota Corolla Ownership – 261K Miles, $500 In Repair Parts, by PN
Curbside Classic: 1981 Toyota Corolla Wagon: It Could Have Been My Previous Car, by PN
CC Capsule: 1981 Toyota Corolla 3-Door Wagon – Too Beige, Or Not Too Beige?, by T87
Curbside Outtake: 1981 Toyota Corolla – Old School Waldorf School Corolla, by PN
COAL: 1980 Toyota Corolla (E70) – One Last Stand for the Wounded Warrior, by Rich Baron
That is amazing specially in that condition I mean I live in Dayton Ohio and they rust on the assembly line if you guys know what I mean. So that was great to see that.
An important clarification: The E70 still had a live axle, but (except for vans and wagons) it was now located by trailing arms and a Panhard rod. Some but not all grades also got rack-and-pinion steering. I don’t think the 1500 GL was one of them — Toyota was nervous about compromising the Corolla’s big-car feel, so rack-and-pinion was introduced first on the cheaper grades and on the twin-cam sporty models.
Liked the “Carolla” versions, before/after this version better. Friend had one of these (2 dr coupe).Was quite a durable, reliable machine..
I think theirs was an “82”.
To me, this version of the Corolla, along with the Volvo 142 and Fiat 128, were perfectly proportioned and detailed boxes that make boxy a term of praise, not disdain. An AE86, let alone a 300 hp GR, may be more fun to drive but I’d rather look at (or ride in the back seat of, and yes I have) an E70. Nice find.
Looks very sharp to these old eyes .
-Nate
I feel the same way when Ford claims their “F-Series” is the best-selling pickup, as the half-ton trucks are distinctly different from the 250+ trucks. Or the early 1980s, when all manner of Oldsmobile cars were “Cutlass (something)”.
At least Chevrolet tells the legitimate truth when they say that Suburban is the “Longest-running nameplate”.
Lot of variation of the model even today but they are not going to bring us to Canada the most interesting version = the Station-wagon/Estate like in Europe and they get it in a hybrid version too.
Instead they impose us the awful truckish ‘Cross’ because Toyota considers the NA market as global one even if the price of gasoline is triple here what it costs in the US. Just too bad .
I bought one of these Corolla sedan semi dead but with running 1.8T engine not legal in TAS, bought a 79 Corolla wagon from a neighbour of the sedan combined the two and drove home in the result, $200 car bright yellow and little rust, my new go to work bomb, not great to drive it replaced a very tired Mazda 323 van that was about to expire but a much better car, we later moved to the town I worked in so the 180km commute was over and I began driving my 63 Holden the Corolla sat on the lawn outside for a day or two then was bought by some young guys who were keen on such cars.
Nice to see a tidy example though I’m not much of a fan.
That claim about being the most produced car in the world has always struck me as being rather disingenuous. The name is the same, but there have been so many different generations with so little carryover, it doesn’t really prove anything, I’m sure Chevrolet could have made a case for the Impala if they added up all the different generations!
That aside, what a nice little car, from back in the days when the Corolla was a little car! I was never interested in these at the time, as we only got them here with the little 4K, so although they looked pleasant enough, I thought of them as an old man’s car with a 1967 engine. The fact that they were still RWD only sealed that impression. If we’d got them with a decent engine in Australia, like this one’s 1.5, I might have thought differently.
The four round headlights on this one give the car quite a different appearance, and as often seems to be the case with older cars in Japan, the shine on this one is incredible. And yes, there’s a model…
Why does it have American spec. bumpers? They looked much better with regular ones.
I’ve noticed before that some of the upper-range Toyotas of this era had larger bumpers, probably without the energy-absorbing gear. I agree the regular ones look better.
Or maybe it’s some inscrutable prestige thing, like their preference for LHD imports.
The 5-mph bumpers were optional on some JDM Toyota models.
It’s been ages I didn’t saw a Corolla from this era. Road salt in Quebec eated a lot of them.
There’s indeed a clean-cut handsomeness in the styling of this gen that I also like, though that doesn’t extend to the four-headlight front here – too crowded, and besides, out of step with the Theme of Squares (which incidentally, sounds like an Italian ’70’s show car). In Oz, it was rack steering, coil solid-axle rear (on sedans), and mostly the old 1.3, which, by the weight of this era, meant that folk got lots of time to admire the aforementioned handsomness at the head of any traffic queue also involving a slight hill.
A sister had the last model, which got an attractive wedge front – the Corolla, not the sister, I don’t ever want to think about that – and luckily, her being a driver of angry determination (not matched by any skills or mechanical sympathy) she could make it beat V8’s. I liked just pootling in it granny-style, quiet, smooth and solid, excellent local seats, nice steering, though it was still before the Japanese had fully worked out how to suspend a car: in this case, too hard and jumpy, but with poor rebound damping like a landyacht anyway.
For a fairly short time, they sold an even handsomer cs/x version with alloys and pinstripes better interior trim and such, and a very lusty imported ohc 1.6 and 5-speed, which despite similar suspension issues, was a large bunch of RWD fun the one time I drove one. Power doesn’t always corrupt, you know.
I want to buy corolla 81, 92 52.
How can I contact