Farewell faithful servant: Obituary for a Toyota Corolla
No object has served me better, or given me a greater ticket to freedom, than a 1987 Toyota Corolla.
It was the first car I owned and lasted so long I’m still only on my second.
It took me on countless road trips around Aotearoa, sometimes so loaded up with cousins and camping gear the suspension bottomed out on even the smallest bumps.
Apart from petrol and the odd top-up of oil and water, it asked almost nothing of me and almost never let me down.
Well, okay, it did break down twice.
The first time was when a coolant hose burst, dumping the entire contents of the radiator onto a hot engine block — the result was spectacular, I can tell you — and a few years later the slave cylinder failed. It turns out it’s pretty hard to drive a manual without a clutch.
Those breakdowns would have caused me major problems if they’d happened far from home, but both occurred just as I was turning into my street at the end of a journey of hundreds of kilometres.
I took that as further proof of the faithfulness of my 1987 Toyota Corolla.
It was also always the first car to pull away at the lights. I put its zippiness down to its sheer simplicity. It was so simple even I could maintain it. There was little to go wrong and even less to impede acceleration.
I think you will understand why I had to name it Silver Lightning.
The one thing that let me down in the end was the bodywork.
The battle against rust, and the anxiety of those six-monthly Warrant of Fitness checks, eventually became too much.
I sold it to a guy in a forest in the Far North who strips down old Toyotas and ships their indestructible motors off to Dubai.
So, somewhere in the Middle East, part of Silver Lightning is still tearing away first at the lights, and going on epic road trips packed with someone else’s cousins.
Fist published on rnz.co.nz in September 2024 as The everyday objects that just keep on keeping on.
