My 1987 Celica AT160 - when one previous owner loves his car for 25 years!

Hi all. I'm new to Celicas and this forum, but CelicaSteve asked for more info on my 87 AT160 so here goes ...

This car was purchased new in Wellington, New Zealand in 1987. Oddly, though I live in Auckland now (660km further north), I was living in Wellington that same year (and for only that year) not far from the suburb in which the owner lived when it was first registered. 25 years later, the car followed me to Auckland. The owner traded it on a new BMW or something and the BMW dealership didn't want a 25-year-old Toyota in their fancy showroom (lucky me), so they sold it to a small-volume dealer who works from home. He advertised it on Trademe (NZ's equivalent of Ebay) where I saw it completely by chance and fell immediately in love with it. It was fate!

I had been driving company cars for 20 years (which always got parked outside of course), but I quit my job a couple of years ago and needed a car. To be honest I was looking for something boring and reliable, but when I saw this Celica I knew I had to have it. So I squeezed my motorbikes (at the time I think I had 7) into one half of my double-garage in order to park the Celica in the other half.

I bought this car in 2012. It had 89,000km on the clock and apart from loving it's appearance, and knowing that they were great handling cars in their day, I knew nothing much about 4th-Gen Celicas and I had no idea how special this one was. As well as the original owner's manual, it still had the original log book in it, which gave the mechanic something to smile about when I took it in for its 100,000km "A" service in March 2012. The cambelt had been changed only 35,000km previously, but as that had been at about the turn of the millenium, we decided it was best to change it.

At the time I bought it, the car appeared never to have been in any kind of accident. There were no supermarket trolley dings and only the tiniest bit of rust on the leading edge of the sunroof. Everything worked and was undamaged with a few very minor exceptions - the electric aerial wasn't working, the passenger sunvisor was broken, the passenger seat rake adjustment wasn't working properly, and the gear lever boot was a bit age-worn. But the upholstery is like new, especially the passenger seats which look like they've never been sat in. This car has probably never spent more than a few weeks of it's 27-year life in the sun as the paintwork is bright and the internal plastics have suffered essentially zero fading or cracking. The rear parcel tray is perfect as is everything in the boot, including the original tool kit (such as it is) and the original unused spare wheel complete with the original unused Bridgestone RD-207 spare tyre.

Since I bought it the only things I've done are to get it fully rust-proofed, remove the rust in the sunroof, carry out a slightly suspect (but largely invisible) repair to the original sunvisor, refurbished the suspension a bit and ... yes I must confess ... I swapped out the original stereo for something that will play CDs and MP3s rather than audio cassettes. But I still have the original stereo.

Sadly, in a carpark at the new Highlands racetrack in Cromwell, a van with bull bars on the front clipped my open door and bent it forward. A replacement door has been found and it's waiting for some TLC. How the original owner managed to avoid any kind of incident in 25 years, not even a flat tyre, is something of a miracle. I suspect it was his "Sunday drive" and he never parked it anywhere except his garage in Kandallah.

I remember walking along the waterfront in Wellington in 1987 and seeing what was then a rather new 4th-Gen Celica and thinking what a brilliant car it was and wondering if, when the second-hand ones were a bit cheaper, I might own one. It never occurred to me that I would wait so long.

Feel free to ask any questions or offer any suggestions.

Tim

 

The 1.6 litre Celicas are apparently very uncommon in NZ as well. I didn't even know they existed until I bought this car. I went today to see about getting a replacement muffler and AT160 wasn't even in the catalog (ST162 yes).

 

I've always had a soft spot for the 4th-Gen Celica, even before I knew it was a 4th-Gen Celica. At the time, with cars like the GT Corolla the Celica, it was as though Toyota had suddenly come of age and started building genuinely great cars. And in NZ, Toyota enlisted Chris Amon to help tweak the suspension for NZ conditions and to promote their products. It was a great time for Toyota in this country. So I was really excited to acquire this particular car. I plan never to sell it. The body is in great shape (apart from the dent in the drivers door) and the 4AGE can be rebuilt to just about any specification I could ever want. But other than possibly fettling the engine a little when it becomes necessary to delve into the internals (which may be a long way down the track yet), I plan to keep it as standard as possible.

And, as requested by Steve, here is a photo of my garage as of a few minutes ago. The bike fleet has been downsized a bit lately. There's a 2003 Suzuki GSX-R600, a 2006 Suzuki S83 Boulevard (my first ever cruiser), a 2003 Aprilia RS50 (which I race, would you believe), two electric scooters in bits (winter project) and a Chinese copy of a Czechoslovakian minimoto (used to race it but now it's more of a wall decoration). I might be into bikes, but my Celica will never be parked outside to make way for more of them.