San Francisco Street Sighting - 1972 Toyota Corona Mark II 1900 Automatic Wagon

For every model of car that someone values and keeps in great condition, there is someone else who beats up on theirs. Such is the case with the Toyota Corona Mark II station wagon that I posted earlier this week. The Corona isn't a terribly valuable vehicle but it is rather rare in the US. This has an upside and a downside: rarity makes them interesting, but it also makes parts hard to find. The guy who owns the red Corona 4x4 trail rig basically has a hacked-up Toyota body on top of a truck chassis. The car probably reached the point where the body panels were too damaged to justify repairing and he just decided to have fun with it. Then there's this Corona Mark II, basically identical except one or two years newer. But my goodness, what a difference in terms of condition.

San Francisco Street Sighting - 1970 Toyota Corona Mark II 1900 Wagon 4x4

A lot of the time, when you run across a custom car that's something completely unique, someone else has already posted something about it online. That makes research a lot easier. But sometimes it's a Frankenstein car and in some cases, the history isn't publicly known. All I know is I've seen this 1970 Toyota Corona Mark II wagon at least three times around the Bay Area since 2010 and I still know very little about it.

Alameda Street Sighting - 1973 Toyota Corona Mark II

If you're a fan of old Hong Kong action movies, you've probably seen
some Toyota Corona Mark IIs ramping through the air and getting smashed into other nondescript Japanese compacts as collateral damage from a car chase. Or perhaps you spotted one of these as highway traffic in an episode of CHiPs. But apart from period TV footage, these cars don't appear to have survived in significant numbers. I was pretty excited to see this one on what Murilee Martin (of Jalopnik and The Truth About Cars) called the "Island the Rust Forgot", Alameda.

San Francisco Street Sighting - 1970 Toyota Corona Deluxe

I've come to respect a number of old economy cars, some of which are maligned for being terrible even if that reputation is undeserved. This week we're looking at cheap cars of the 1970s.

Los Angeles Street Sighting - 1970 Toyota Corona Mark II

Rounding out this series of quote-unquote "Big Three" Summer Road Trip Wagons is one from the most recent addition to the top-seller podium: Toyota. For a few years, Toyota pulled ahead of GM in North American sales, taking the #1 spot. That lead, of course, imploded when the entire news media and blogosphere jumped on Toyota for its unintended acceleration scandal, and subsequent recall of just about every Toyota model sold in the US for some problem or another.

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.

San Francisco Street Sighting - 1971 Toyota Corona

I've seen several older Japanese cars in SF. This 1974 [EDIT: 1971] Toyota Corona Deluxe is one of the oldest Toyotas I've spotted there, and it's the third-oldest Corona I've seen in the city. This must have been pretty loaded in its day, seeing as this one had the automatic transmission option so rarely seen on imported cars of that era. I guess if you want to go mainstream in the US, it helps to have an automatic available. It makes sense though, in a city with such steep hills. This Corona has had a pretty careful owner and shows surprisingly little rust for its age and location only a mile from the Bay.