Tested: 1971 Toyota Corolla 1600

From the September 1971 Issue of Car and Driver.

Shortly after Detroit’s Powers That Be signaled their recognition that the small car thing was truly a revolution and not merely aberration—by introducing small cars of their own—we put together a six-model sampling. A typ­ical Car and Driver magnum opus comparison test on a representative selection of “small” cars. This sampling included Ford’s then-new Pinto; Chevrolet’s ditto Vega; the American Motors Gremlin; Volkswagen’s Super Beetle; Chrysler Corpora­tion’s Simca 1204; and the representative from Japan was Toyo­ta’s Corolla, which then came with a 1200cc engine. At that time we had a lot of good things to say about the Toyota: principally that it was remarkably roomy for its overall size, and offered both comfort and quality in more-than-fair measure at Toyota’s $1798 asking price. In fact, we liked the car a lot.

And why didn’t the Toyota 1200 win? Because its brakes were marginal, it didn’t handle very well (swervy in a cross-wind, and given to a canine lifting of its inside rear wheel when cornering hard) and—worst of all—it was a buzzbox at freeway speeds. At 65 mph you could almost hear it grunt and feel its headlights bulge with strain. In some cars that strained feeling is more ap­parent than real, but in the Toyota 1200 it was real enough to carry a notarized certificate. At 70 mph, the car’s 4.22-to-one axle ratio and 12-inch wheels (with 6.00-12 tires) had its engine spinning 4700 rpm—and the engine began its protest at about 4200 rpm, or 62 mph. It was a fairly gutty device in urban traffic, if not too heavily laden and if its driver made maximum use of the transmission, but a freeway flier it wasn’t and that’s part of the game in most of the country these days. Thus, one third-place finish for Toyota. A good car for the price, but not quite enough car for the market.

Now, enter the Toyota 1600 Corolla, and exit much of our criticism. The difference between the 1200 Corolla and the new 1600 is enormously greater than the added dollop (here, a dollop comes to exactly 423cc—1588cc versus 1165cc) of engine dis­placement would suggest. Maybe it can be said better by telling you that the 1200 engine delivered 73 hp at 6000 rpm, and that it’s 102 hp at 6000 rpm for the 1600 with a similar increase in torque—101 lbs.-ft. at 3800 rpm versus 75 lbs.-ft. at 3800 for the 1600. All of which is about what you’d expect from the increase in displacement but it doesn’t begin to tell the whole story either. In fact, the 1600 engine is not the bored and stroked 1200 that many people seem to imagine; it’s a new engine, with design features and operating characteristics different from any preced­ing Toyota.

Curiously, to us anyway, Toyota’s bigger engines have always managed to combine an overhead camshaft with an unconvinc­ingly soggy performance at high revs. Now, everybody knows that overhead cammers are supposed to be happy highwinders, but Toyota’s are the traditional exceptions; they’re good, solid plodders and refuse any other kind of duty. And now, as though trying to further confound those who think they know what is what with engines, Toyota hits us with this 1600, which has its camshaft tucked away down in the block and a forest of pushrods and rocker arms leading up to the valves, and it feels, from the driver’s seat, like there might be a couple of dozen camshafts in its cylinderhead. Lively, it is. And you can get nearly 80 mph in third gear without feeling anything near an impending separation from within the engine.

That kind of willingness to make power at high revs is nice, especially while passing on a narrow road, but it’s not the new engine’s best feature. Neither, for that matter, is the 1600’s low-speed lugging capability. Actually, all the good stuff happens when you get above 2800 rpm, which is near 50 mph in top gear, 36 mph in third. Right there is where the engine really comes to life, with a forward surge under full throttle and there is very much a “sports car” feel coming from this unpretentious sedan. The Toyota 1600’s engine is, as the sporting set are wont to say, “cammy”; a bit flat at low revs (though without a lumpy idle) and then suddenly bursting with energy when the valve timing and the columns of gases in the intake and exhaust manifolds all get into step. It is an engine that gives its best for drivers who drive, and one that will sulk a bit in the hands of those who would let dust gather on the shift knob. (For those, there is the option of a 2-speed automatic anyhow.)

Of course, while whizzing along a freeway, you won’t have to do any shifting, and you’ll like the way the 1600 Corolla runs at 65–70 mph without any feeling of strain—and there is a goodly amount of power in reserve at that speed. The new hemi-head engine has absolutely transformed this side of the Corolla’s char­acter. And it has done it all without serious dollar penalty: the car is more expensive to buy with the bigger engine, $170 more, but still not above its competition and we averaged between 22 and 27 miles-per-gallon of fuel in driving that was mostly 70 mph cruising. That’s within fractions of what you could expect with the smaller 1200, if you could work yourself up to the cruelty required to push it that fast.

In the area of braking, the new Toyota Corolla has also been blessed with a transformation, albeit a mi­nor one. In the 1200 Corolla we tested, the brakes were both weak and had a spongy feel at the pedal. Now the sponginess is gone. Unfortunately the brakes themselves are no better. The tires are larger (6.15-13s compared to the 6.00-12s on the 1200) but the 1600 is also 140 lbs. heavier. The big­ger tires apparently aren’t enough to com­pensate for the weight increase because the test car required 235 feet (0.700) to stop from 70 mph, five feet longer than the 1200. This is extremely poor braking per­formance. The Corolla was introduced with substandard brakes and Toyota obvi­ously intends to leave it that way.

The Corolla could also use some im­provements in its handling. With the new, bigger engine it is even more nose-heavy than before (the 1200 had 980 lbs. on its front wheels; the 1600, 1100 lbs.) and while this 57% front weight bias has made the car less sensitive to side-winds, it has also largely negated any of the potential benefits to handling of the large tires and wheels (rim-width remains the same).

With all that weight up front, and the habit of raising its inside rear wheel still very much with the Corolla, it cannot be made to corner hard. Get it on a skid pad and you quickly find that the car assumes a low speed, low cornering-force equilibri­um-with the front wheels understeering to scrub off speed and the inside rear wheel unloaded and spinning, which keeps you from forcing the nose around any faster. On the other hand, the Corolla is agile (it could hardly be otherwise, given its quick steering and short wheelbase). For most drivers, this agility will pass for good han­dling.

Despite the Corolla’s new straight-line strength, no one driving the 1600 Corolla we tested has any excuse for getting a tick­et on the freeway. At precisely 70 mph in­dicated (a safe-enough 67 mph), the engine vibrations, subdued by the rubber motor­ mounts at lower speeds, begin marching in lock-step with various body panels, knobs, fixtures, seat-cushion springs, etc., and the view in the rear-view mirror turns into a blur. “That’s it, Driversan,” the car says, “you can now start looking for attention from the shirobai.” You don’t have to ac­cept the warning, as the 1600 Corolla will charge right on up to a true 90 mph, and you don’t even have to listen to the buzz, as it fades away, and everything becomes smooth and silent when you get above that critical resonance at 70. We appreciate Toyota’s concern for law and order, but we wish that they would re-tune the Corolla’s engine mounts or panels or something, and move the resonance higher. Maybe the U.S. Department of Transportation could suggest a figure.

As was true of the earlier 1200, the 1600 Corolla is somewhat cramped in the knee room it provides for rear-seat passengers, but with the seats pushed right back it is a marvel of small-package comforts for the driver and a friend. The front bucket seats are contoured to give lateral support far in excess of any side forces the Corolla is ca­pable of generating, and have those neat reclining backs. All controls are just about where you would want them and both inte­rior style and finish bespeak of quality far above the Corolla’s price. The only thing we didn’t like inside the Corolla was that all too often one either swelters or gets wind-buffeted. Toyota’s habit of building ­in all of the air-conditioning ducting just in case someone asks for the refrigerator pump, cooling coils, etc., gives the car a nicely comprehensive collection of vents—­two of them being directional spiggots. Unhappily, neither the ducting nor the vents are adequate to keeping the car’s in­terior cool unless the incoming air is refrig­erated. The piddling amount of air they ad­mit is barely adequate with ambient tem­perature at 70°F, and forward motion at 70 mph. Go slower, or let the air get warmer, and you’ll be obliged to crank down the windows—in which case the wind whipping around your head will be enough to convert anything but a crew-cut into a passable imitation of an Afro in mere mo­ments. And the wind roar at anything above 30 mph will be deafening, as the air spills off the comers of the windshield and into the wingless side windows.

However, you can’t expect everything in a car that stands so near the bottom of the whole automotive price range, and no one can say that the Toyota does not more than fully justify what its makers are ask­ing of purchasers. With the 1600 engine, it performs well enough to be totally useful to anyone not in the major cargo business, even for longish trips, and the enthusiast driver (who would have found the 1200 Corolla a dull proposition) will positively enjoy the way it responds crisply to urging with the gear lever. The various gimcracks and furbelows added to this car’s exterior to distinguish it from those previous do not please, but its high level of finish certainly does. And service, when the need arises, shouldn’t be a problem with Toyota’s deal­er network approaching the point of ubi­quity. In the Los Angeles area, where it all began, Toyota and the others have pushed small-car sales to about half the total. With things like the 1600 Corolla around, that could get to be a country-wide situation.

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Source: Reviews - aranddriver.com