During the oil crises of the 1970s, diesel fuel was often easier to find and cheaper to buy than gasoline in the United States, and oil-burning Mercedes-Benzes, Volkswagens, and Peugeots sold reasonably well here.
Then General Motors jumped in with an Oldsmobile 5.7-liter V8 converted to run on diesel, which suffered—in very public fashion—from many reliability problems. By the mid-1980s, Americans could still buy new diesel cars, but few did so. Here's one of the rarest of all of those cars, one so rare that I had never seen one in person before: a 1984 Toyota Corolla sedan with factory-installed diesel power, discovered in a Colorado self-service yard last week.
Toyota offered a naturally aspirated diesel engine in the US-market 1984 and 1985 Corolla sedan and liftback (the early Camry had an optional turbodiesel engine here, in theory—let us know if you ever see one). Oil prices were crashing hard during the mid-1980s, and so the penny-pinching appeal of a cheaper-per-mile diesel car wasn't enough to persuade many Americans to get over their Oldsmobile-inspired fears. Still, someone bought this car new!
In fact, plenty of new diesel models were available to American car shoppers in 1984. Ford would sell you an Escort or Lynx with a 2.0-liter Mazda diesel that year, for example, and even the Lincoln Mark VII could be had with a BMW-sourced diesel. GM still offered the dreaded Oldsmobile diesel V8 in 1984, plus a 4.3-liter diesel V6 made by lopping off two cylinders from that engine (no, it's not related to the small-block-derived 4.3-liter Chevy V6 engine). Nissan sold—well, tried to sell—diesel Sentras here, believe it or not, and a few Americans actually bought Chevy Chevettes with Isuzu diesel engines (plus their Isuzu-badged sibling, the I-Mark Diesel). The list goes on and on, but Mercedes-Benz was the only company moving many new oil-burning cars on our shores in 1984. My point is, finding a diesel Corolla is like spotting Bigfoot in your back yard.
Feast your eyes on the Toyota 1C diesel four-cylinder. It displaces 1.8 liters and was rated at a hilarious 56 hp (and an acceptable 76 lb-ft of torque). I took my driver-training classes in a 48-hp Volkswagen Rabbit Diesel, and it was terrifyingly slow; this car would have been slightly quicker. I found registration paperwork in the car indicating its longtime owner was a big diesel repair shop in Denver, so we can assume it spent much of its life as a parts runner.
Toyota was able to brag that the 1984 Corolla offered an amazing 59 mpg on the highway because of the diesel version. Sure, there was some fine print in that claim.
Yes, that's an automatic transmission. If I'm reading my reference books correctly, the 1984 Corolla Diesel sedan could be purchased only with a slushbox (the liftback version was apparently a five-speed-manual-only car).
That initial buyer wasn't satisfied with a luxurious two-pedal rig, adding air conditioning to the options list. The MSRP on this car was $7398, and the A/C cost 630 bucks extra (that's $1830 extra on a $21510 car, when reckoned in 2022 dollars). Meanwhile, the very same Corolla with a gasoline engine listed at just $6848 ($19,910 now).
What the heck, might as well add the 415-buck top-of-the-line AM/FM/cassette multiplex radio ($1205 today), which somehow managed to avoid being stolen during the 1980s. I think this car may have been built and shipped over as part of the press fleet for the launch events showing off the new front-drive Corollas, just to prove to American automotive journalists that the diesel version really existed. Its build date is November 1983, which fits that theory.
I was prepared to see some galactic-scale number on the odometer, because it's a diesel car that spent many years in the service of a busy repair shop. Surprise, just 89,690 miles! The last time I found a discarded 1984 Corolla, it had better than a quarter-million miles on the clock. Perhaps the speedometer cable broke in 1993? I may have to visit the shop and get the story on this car; stay tuned.
Fun to drive.
The Doubting Thomases in San Francisco (and their dogs) couldn't believe the '84 Corolla sedan was so good. Note that the gasoline highway fuel economy was 12 mpg worse than the diesel's.
