Although most people might consider it odd I enjoy wandering around the junkyard when I get the chance. I have in the past claimed that it is a cheap form of entertainment and certainly delivers a better bang for buck value than spending a couple hours in the theater watching yet another super hero movie. As a result I have often come across interesting vehicles at the junkyard but this WiLL Vi has to rank as one of the most unexpected finds I have seen. Nissan had their more well known Pike Factory retro cars of the late Eighties and early Nineties but Toyota also got into the retro styling game as well and one example is this reserve rake rear window Vi.
WiLL was not strictly a car company only but rather a shared marketing strategy aimed at younger buyers in the Japanese market. A diverse set of brands participated including Toyota, Panasonic, Kao, among others. The product offerings under the WiLL brand were incredibly different ranging from beer to personal hygiene to fax machines. Toyota offered vehicles with unusual styling intended to appeal to buyers outside the traditional Toyota brand but sold at Toyota Vista Store locations. The intended vision of the automotive side of WiLL would have some parallels to Scion in North America.
You can visit the archived website courtesy of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine here.
The styling is unique and channels various small cars from the Sixties without trying to copy any specific one. The rear window is a reminder of a Citroen Ami or Ford Anglia perhaps but with an overall French small car vibe. Under the skin the mechanical specification was purely Toyota Vitz (Yaris, Echo hatchback depending on market) with front wheel drive and a 2NZ-FE 1.3L four cylinder engine. Acceleration would have been leisurely with an mandatory automatic transmission and curb weight of just over 2,000lbs.
The retro fad had faded by the time the Vi was released in the year 2000 and perhaps as a result sales were disappointing which lead to a short two model year lifespan. The slightly more convention looking VS and equally unconventional Cypha followed in 2001 and 2002 respectively. John Llyod shared this brochure for the VS.
The equally unusual but less retro Cypha.
Why would such a rare (especially in North America) vehicle find its way to the scrapyard in Alberta? Coming around the front it is easy to see that a collision coupled with a lack of easily obtainable repair panels likely did this one in. It seems improbable that anyone will have much practical use for any of the parts off it. While the engine is similar to a Toyota Echo its smaller size was not sold in this market making it rather undesirable.
For reference here is the front end of one that has not been involved in a front end collision.
Amazingly someone did snag the HVAC controls and radio out of this one however which makes the dashboard look even more minimalist. It is a bit sad that such a rare and interesting car that traveled so far from its home market only to be crashed and then unceremoniously dumped into a scrapyard. Perhaps this post can stand in as a memorial of a sort.
As the owner of a gen 2 Yaris hatchback, I recognize the hard points of that dash. It looks like other than giving up the hatch, the Will Vi buyer also lost not only the extra glove compartments on the top half of the dash but also the conventional one is gone in favor of an open bin. I wonder if the cupholders under the outboard face-level HVAC outlets are still in place.
With the third generation Yaris, Toyota sacrificed all of that on the temple of critic-pleasing conventional gauge placement and Soft-Touch Materials.
I don’t mean to be rude or unrespectful. So, I won’t comment on this car’s appearance.
Great find David. A genuinely sad fate for such a cute little car. Especially, the way it appears isolated in the yard from the other junked cars. Indeed very French in its looks. Hoping automotive design trends towards more friendly, less aggressive, shapes. Not holding my breath.
I recall creating a Photoshop a few years of the ‘long roof’ version of the WiLL Vi, and posting it here at CC. 🙂
It was a little isolated but I do not believe deliberately so. The yard has a non-square shape so the rows were not perfectly lined up. That had a few older vehicles up front which are set off to the side. I believe they have a longer time in inventory.
Remarkable find! Between Stephanie and I, we’d give one of these a loving home if it needed adoption.
They will not sell whole cars out of the yard so this one is a goner sadly. It is a policy I see quite often here.
You need to visit NZ Paul, bring a large suitcase
Uh-oh. You’re not perchance thinking about taking the engine and wiring harness out of that, are you?
Nope. It is an automatic. A regular Echo 1.5L four cylinder and 5 speed manual would make a nice match for my Innocenti however …
Is this supposed to look like a Citroen ami 6?
That’s what I thought when I saw the breezeway back and pleated rear deck lid
This one actually looks better.
So….now we know what became of the person that “designed” the Pontiac Aztek.
Yeah, he went on to design the C6 and C7 Corvette, as well as the 5th gen Camaro. (Tom Peters)
This on the other hand was, and quote:
“The vehicle was designed by Toyota’s recently formed Virtual Venture Company, and is intended to appeal to a new generation of buyers.
Virtual Venture Company is a think-tank charged with the job of capturing the imagination of Japan’s youth, and is headed by 43 year-old Jim Shimizu, a former senior executive with Toyota Australia.”
source: https://web.archive.org/web/20111121230706/http://www.autoweb.com.au/cms/A_53207/title_Toyotas-WiLL-Vi-Bound-For-Sydney-Motor-Show/newsarticle.html
All three flavours of WiL are quite common here in NZ. Per capita, you’re probably more likely to see a WiL here than anywhere else. The Vs was ahead of its time with the slit windows and bulky body and looks almost normal.
Nice find! Like you, I too enjoy roaming among automotive carcasses. A scrapyard would make for a good meetup location 🙂
Well, if Country Classic Cars now has an earthquake and a flood that may just about cover it.
+2
I miss the days when I had time to go “treasure hunting” at the Pick-a-Part, That was before LKQ bought them all. Back in the day, one particular trip found a complete first gen IH Scout 800 front end clip and bumper. Pristine. The same day found not one, but two sets of the best 428 heads Ford ever made, both from Thunderbird engine bays.
No Daniel, you are not odd at all.
I don’t see much that’s retro about the WiLL Vi, just weird. I guess those concave ribs could be construed as retro, but what old car had them?
So you could get a WiLL washing machine to complement your WiLL car? Why not? GM, Ford, and even AMC and Studebaker made washing machines too at one point.
Sad end to a unique little runt of a car. Just goes to show that you need to be conscious of your vehicle’s size. If a pigeon or soccer ball or such is in your lane, you need to steer around the obstacle, not attempt to go through it.
I like everything about this, only part I dislike is the front end which is really milquetoast for such an unconventional design(the damage is flattering in this case), I also don’t see what’s so retro about it, if I stumbled across it I’d instantly think it was a product of 2000-2005, just because it doesn’t conform to the absolutes of “modern” car design aesthetics doesn’t make it retro to me.
As an aside I never liked the term retro, it instantly stigmatizes anything it’s applied to as a novelty niche attraction customers are groomed to look at but not buy in volume. The frustrating part is, how many people call Porsche 911s *retro* or any BMW (especially in the immediate pre-Bangle years)? Nobody. They’re iconic, they’re the ‘brand image’, blah blah. They are as retro in design as a ‘New’ Beetle, a Dodge Challenger or a Fiat 500, but because these were revived they get the retro stigma, “Well I like it, but I worry about resale with a fad car”. (every talking head is shocked and appalled the Challenger has sold so solidly for so long)
I’ve found some weird and rare cars at junkyards but this tops them all by a long shot, my favorite car experiences are finding something like this where I have no idea what I’m looking at, and at a junkyard especially where you can really gather clues and sleuth for the answer. Like you, I’m well entertained by these places. I kinda got depressed mid-September when I came to the realization I missed every single car show and event over the summer I planned to attend, but when I added up the times I went junkyarding across the map, wandering the rows and rows of forgotten cars, and scavenging good parts and taking pictures I didn’t exactly miss out on the core experiences of a good car show. Some people don’t like getting dirty, and I get it, but for me it’s a huge part of what keeps my interest in cars…interesting!
I have to say it almost doesn’t look too bad in orange – certainly better than the silver one.
Lack of readily available panels after a crash saw it in a junkyard, not an issue locally I assure you, theres a silver one here with random orange front and door panels they arent all that rare and despite the small engine they seem to go ok I followed one being driven quite enthusiastically by its female operator she was flinging it into roundabouts with gay abandon, that could explain the multi coloured one as well, just part of our interesting automotive landscape along with many other JDM oddities.
Matt, I would argue that roaming junk yards is far more interesting than any (new car) auto show. Sadly, I don’t think there are any yards left in CT where one can just wander around.
That’s quite a find. I feel sorry for the owner because importing from Japan to Canada comes at quite a cost.
I’d be interested to know how the insurance company settled the claim.
I too have always had a love to roam junk yards. My Mom used to tell everyone when I was a kid “Rick has a fascination with junkyards. Every time we drive by one he gets excited and has to look.” My Dad was a farm equipment company rep when I was a small kid and we got transferred a lot. One place we lived was just across a field from a junkyard whose owner’s son was a friend of mine. We used to sneak through the fence and spend hours playing in the cars in the back part. That was in 1953-54 and I often wonder what the cars were that we played in. I do remember that up front he always had some late model wrecks.
I love going to junkyards. Does everyone not have a pull-a-part or a pick-n’pull? I think it’s pretty much a given that anyone who’s interested in pedestrian old cars, like on curbside classic, will be interested in seeing deceased pedestrian old cars up close and wondering what caused their doom. So many memories!
Every so often, Toyota tries to get away from the 1997 Camry, do funky, and ends up with something like this. It looks like something a cartoon character from a Nickelodeon show would drive. Nissan managed to do cute/retro right with the Pao and S-Cargo, the PT Cruiser was done right, the Audi TT was done right, even the Thunderbird LOOKED good. Then there’s this. Even if you think it’s cute on first impression, can you imagine driving this EVERY DAY? And trying to be taken seriously? Or not? Whether the Citroen works or not is debatable but that only had the inward canted rear window, this has the inward canted window, appears to be made of plastic, and is also arched. The best analogy for this I can think of is when the 300 lb balding bespectacled accountant wants to cosplay Batman. Just. Don’t.
You’re not the only one who likes roaming junkyards: If you have three hours, this thread and comments below are about the most interesting on the whole internet: https://bringatrailer.com/2018/10/28/question-of-the-week-whats-your-wildest-junkyard-find/
I remember seeing “what is WILL” images on enthusiast sites back in the day, before we got Scion. I classified it as Japanese eccentricity and moved on.
The reverse slant rear window actually makes sense since it gives more rear headroom, as seen in the Ford Anglia and Citroen Ami.
Hey, that’s at Bucks Auto in Calgary!
Indeed it is. They had quite a few interesting vehicles there.
Living in Japan, I do see these occasionally, and a friend of mine has a WiLL mini- refrigerator (he actually got it cheap as a close out when the brand went away). I applaud their attempt to break away from the mainstream, however imperfectly.
I was in Japan in 2000 or so when they had the huge marketing launch push for the WiLL brand. It was all consuming – TV, in appliance stores with cute post-teen girlZ, at dealerships, and parked cars in Ginza and Omatesando with cute post-teen girlZ, and the product did not live up to the hype, similar to the stories I have heard about Edsel launch marketing.
What wrecking yard in Alberta is this orange WILL VI in?.