Tag: Carina a60 (Page 1 of 2)

How do these Toyota Lasre Engines survive in the desert heat without any cooling?

What are these Toyota LASRE engines doing in the Sahara desert? – Carina Sightings

February 14, 2024 / banpei / 0 Comments

What is this 1982 Toyota Carina ad supposed to mean? Are the Toyota LASRE engines supposed to fuel the infamous Sirocco winds? Sirocco winds are “a hot wind, often dusty or rainy, blowing from North Africa across the Mediterranean to southern Europe.”

*Toyota LASRE engines in the Paris-Dakar rally*

Alternatively, are these engines supposed to give the Carina competing in the second Paris-Dakar rally a small push? Or perhaps, are these Toyota LASRE engines supposed to be giant windmills that work the reverse: wind makes them turn and in effect they suck up hydrocarbons via the exhaust and poop out fuel on the intake side?

We’ll probably never know what went through the minds of the marketing people at Toyota in 1982.

Toyota Carina A60 history [JDM Trivia]

October 11, 2016 / banpei / 2 Comments

Welcome to JDM Trivia #12 where I describe the Toyota Carina A60 history.

Carina, Corona and Celica combined

The Toyota Carina A60 started its life when Toyota decided to combine the platforms of the Corona, Carina and Celica. This delivered a floorpan that was identical for all three cars and some of the Corona and Carina body panels are even exchangeable.

Toyota Carina A60 generation

This generation of the Toyota Carina was produced between September 1981 and April 1988. For Toyota this was considered to be a very long lasting production. It obviously helped that the Carina derived van stayed into production till April 1988, but also the sedan and coupe were available till the end of 1987. Continue reading

Picture of the Week: Toyota Carina A60 initial design sketch

September 1, 2014 / banpei / 0 Comments

As I described a few weeks ago: I bought a CD-ROM with all Toyota Carina FR workshop books (scanned) on it and it is a treasure of information. From now and then there are a few hidden gems in there, like the initial design sketches for the four door sedan of the Toyota Carina A60:

The front is a bit more slanted than the production version and if you squint your eyes you can see the Toyota Corona A140 in it that shared the same platform. Wheel arches are more squared off than the Carina and this is quite similar to the Corona as well.

However the sketch from the rear is unmistakeably the four door Toyota Carina A60 sedan:

The tail lights are clearly the same design as the tail lights of the zenki sedan. Even the rear door has the blacked out triangular part that finishes of the lines of the rear door.

Perhaps Toyota made a study to see if they could fully merge the Corona and Carina with the A60/T140 generation? Eventually they managed to do it in the next T150 generation.

Carina Trivia: the Toyota Carina A60 transmission overview

August 14, 2014 / banpei / 0 Comments

Some time ago I bought a CD-ROM from Japan with the Japanese Toyota handbooks hoping it would contain the wiring diagrams of the Japanese Carina A60 or at least the body repair manual for this to help me out with the wiring of the JDM gauge cluster. Unfortunately I haven’t found any pin out for the gauge cluster, except the one used for the digital cluster. What I did found was an awful lot of trivia like the Toyota Carina A60 transmission overview. The ones listed here are taken from the updated handbook of May 1985 (so released during the facelift) and the two tables reveals quite some surprises. There is an additional one covering the transmissions for the vans, but that reveals hardly anything surprising.

First of all here is the transmission per capacity per body type listed:

I tried to copy the kanji and decypher the meaning of them, so don’t pin me down on any translations here:
○ means these were the choices/options
◎ means it was an extra option/special case (e.g. overdrive)
☓ means it was abolished (not available anymore)
Top section is the four door, middle section the three door coupe and the bottom section the five door wagon (Surf).

This table reveals to me:
1. The Toyota Carina GT (and GT-R) only came with a manual transmission (T50).
2. Only the Toyota Carina GT-T (and GT-TR) came with either the W55 manual or the A43D automatic transmission
3. The 1C diesel engine featured the W51 and A42D automatic

The other table contains the transmission per model code per body type:

Legend is basically almost the same as the table above.

This table reveals to me:
There was something like the SG-JUNE (misspelled Jeune?), SE-EXTRA, GT-R and GT-TR. All of them were options. I can’t tell what exactly in this list is the option over the existing transmission.

I did find additional information regarding the differences from the GT/GT-T and GT-R/GT-TR models and most of it is trim based. Will definitely post this in a later posting.

For completeness, here is the A67 wagon overview:

Nothing surprising here: T40, T50, A41 and W51 all present like in the previous overviews.

Some trivia regarding the bellhousings:
The 1C diesel engine has the same bellhousing as the Toyota S engine and a popular fit for the 3S-G(T)E with the W series transmission. Also the 1S engine features a bellhousing that fits the T50 transmission, so for cars with a T50 transmission this is a popular bellhousing to mount a 3S-G(T)E to the existing box.

I have created a template to put this overview in a nicely formatted html table here: Toyota Carina A60 transmissions and I will fill the blanks in the upcoming day(s).

Trivia: Why the Toyota Carina A60 failed in Europe

July 14, 2014 / banpei / 2 Comments

There are a lot of speculations why the third generation Carina (the Toyota Carina A60) failed to sell in large numbers in Europe. One of them is that Datsun (aka Nissan) launched their new Bluebird 910 around the same time and offered a better pricing. This is partly true and this posting is about the other part which can be captured in the scan below:

I made this scan of a Dutch book about Honda and Toyota from the mid 80s. During this period the Carina II T150 was selling quite well while the Carina A60 already had been phased out.

The photos above are press photos distributed in the 80s by Toyota Netherlands (aka Louwman & Parqui) and you clearly see a difference in marketing: the old is marketed with a conservative mustached salesman-guy and the new with the streamlined (French) glider in the background. I don’t think the annotation of the photos need to be translated as they are similar. ;)
Notice the glider: I will come back to that later…

This is obviously not the only marketing they did, another example is this 1982 ad targeted at Ford Taunus drivers: Continue reading

Brilliant: Toyota Carina A60 timeline

May 3, 2014 / banpei / 0 Comments

I did post a couple of Toyota Carina A60 timelines in the past but now I found a nice tool to visualize this even better:

The data is based upon the Carina Chronology I posted in the past and added some titles and photos.
I tried to make it a bit funny by adding some rustoseum photos of the Carina models that got discontinued. ;)