Friday, September 3, 2010

San Francisco Street Sighting - 1973 Toyota Corona Deluxe


Last year I featured a 1974 Toyota Corona as my first Japanese "Street Sighting". Some time after that, I photographed another old Corona with a similar body but a different front end. It took a fair amount of Googling to determine what year this second car was, but the oddly Dodgelike crossbar grille turned out to be a 1973 Corona Deluxe.



The "Deluxe" part of the car is evidently all the gingerbread Toyota tacked on to make the Corona look like something that belonged in the US market. Vinyl top, chrome trim and full wheel covers give it a passing resemblance to the typical "Malaise" era barge, but for the fact it's freaking tiny next to a 1973 Chevy Impala. Amusingly, something we now take for granted, a passenger-side mirror, appears not to have been part of the "Deluxe" package.
This car looks like it's lived its whole life in San Francisco. I say that not only because it's in relatively poor condition, but also because of the Toyota of San Francisco license plate frame advertising their Pine & Van Ness location which is long gone, replaced by a much newer facility a few blocks up the road at Geary. The pictures I got of it were nothing to write home about (though evidently enough to write a blog post about...) but they'll have to do. I only saw the car that one time, late in the day after a class. I don't expect to see it again. Once a vehicle reaches this point of jalopitude in the city, it rarely returns to its former glory. More often than not, it just gets driven into the ground. Shame.

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