It’s been many years driving the ol girl, and now its time to review it as I say good bye. To be exact, the vehicle is a 1989 Toyota Camry DX StationWagon.
Outside the primary birth control affects the station wagon gives off, it turned out to be one hell of a vehicle. Now, as I’ve moved on to my next vehicle I have noticed a new side affect that I’ll miss from the old girl. The pan handler deterrent factor. It became evident that more people where bugging me for spare change once I upgraded to a vehicle within a stones throw away from looking new.
The looks are minimalist, nothing spectacular. A fake chrome grill, and a smile so common only a Volkswagen could out number.
Unlike Wagons of today which are tall, wannabe SUV’s, the Camry is shorter in height but in no way compromising the capacity. I’m 6 foot tall and have a good four inches left of space above my head. I never worried about not having enough room. I could fit 8 foot long boards between the back door and the windshield. The vehicle moved me from a multitude of apartments with out having to ask for help from some fool with a pick up truck. Plus those rainy days didn’t bother me at all on moving days.
Power wise the car didn’t have any, but it had something most cars these days don’t have, ambition. The enegine would rev, rev, and rev some more, the power kicked in above 5,000 RPMs. Compared to many cars of today, it had a far better power to weight ratio making it accelerate fater than most common cars on the road. 0-60 was a modest 8-9 seconds. I feel like i should be enunciating the fact that my car was a manual transition which in my opinion provides better performance than those automated trannies out there. Since the car was feather light compared to vehicles of today, the gas mileage blows away many of the modern equivalents. I could consistently achieve 28 -31 miles to the gallon and even today as the engine ages it still gets similar mileage, however I do need to mention the oil - mile ratio did go up with age, but its nearly 2o years old so we have to have some leeway.
The upkeep routine on the old girl was pretty minimal. Less money was spent on maintaining the vehicle than most of the cars my friends had. The most expensive work which had to be done was the timing belt (routine stuff), and the slave cylinder to the clutch. the slave cylinder was a DIY project, which worked out pretty well. Otherwise, we had replaced the shocks on the suspension which was pretty easy. The struts for the rear hatch are both shot, but hell a dollar stick works just as well.
I’d love to note a few features this lill Camey had which have yet to be re-implemented in other cars for reasons I’m just utterly clueless about. For instance, the head lights turn off on their own when the car is off and the door is opened. Real simple feature and just about one of my favorite features it had. During winter why bother turning off the lights? Battery doesn’t get drained and you never had to worry. Oddly enough this feature didn’t make it onto the 1991 Camry, and since then I’ve yet to see it get re-implemented in a reasonable way. Now days modern cars go insane with sound the moment you attempt to open the door with the lights on. God forbid the car do something for you with out just being annoying about it.
Another feature which will be a pure target for debate was the automatic seat belts. An ingenious feature which lasted only a short generation of cars. It was pulled from production lines because people forgot to wear the lap belt for obvious reasons and the car was just a bit more dangerous. In all reality, the lap belt was only useful in specific accidents (specifically when the door opened), and in health and safety over protection those accidents had to be expected. Zzzz…
A few features of note to complain about… it had one feature which caused it to drive away from where I left it. Twice I’d parked it, and a few hours later it was gone. lets just say, driving the most stolen car didn’t seem to be a luxury what so ever. Oddly enough it being stolen didn’t bother me as much as people breaking in and robbing me. After the 3rd stereo I had to give up. It just wasn’t worth it. This turned into a benefit because those days I got pulled over the excuse “I apologize for not having my registration/insurance on me, as you can tell my car was broken into recently” in the short run they always just looked it up on their lill computers and I never kept anything of value in my car. Oddly enough I learned somethings, baseball cleats are steal-able… Inline skates are ignored.
In the end, the vehicle turned into one hell of a car. When I received it, it was 15 thousand miles short of 100k, and as I sell it, its a couple fuel tanks past 200k. It took me on a tour of the state a number of ways. If I had the choice, I’d do it again execept I’d have invested in a trunk monkey or a guard dog to protect the sterio syetem.
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