Unintended Recollections

Our first family car was a late 70s Toyota Corona. Carbureted, manual everything, and its greatest achievement was to reach Baguio City by the skin of its teeth. In the City of Pines’ particularly steep streets, we had to pile out so my dad could coax the car to the top, else it would run out of steam. Call it unintended deceleration. Still, I don’t recall him ever wanting his money back from Toyota, or consulting a lawyer.

In fact, that car faithfully served us for the whole of the 80s. Built at a time when power steering was a luxury and synchronized transmissions were some sort of New Wave thing, my brother had the good fortune – if you can call it that – to learn to drive with it. We lurched along our subdivision’s streets, stalling and lurching, crunching the gears and building his biceps as he muscled the car, trying to withstand dad’s rebukes as pedestrians ran for their lives.

It almost blew up once. It stalled on the highway, dad got out, opened the hood and – to his horror – a fuel line had caught fire. A hastily applied handkerchief over the line killed the flame, and the car was towed to a talyer to live and fight another day. Too young to drive then, my job was to help clean it on Sundays. Weekday mornings I had the privilege of starting the engine, turning the ignition key until the starter motor went Greeeennjjj...!!!

Eventually dad sold it to an officemate who fixed it up and enjoyed it for a few more years. Either it still soldiers on to this day, or it has been recycled into a hundred monobloc chairs.

Funny how stories of massive recalls and runaway Toyotas in the US evoke memories long buried under the pile of information and experiences relating to new cars that is the life of a motoring writer.

What began with floor mats has mushroomed into a full-blown problem of a few high-speed crashes (sadly, with fatalities), accelerator pedals, probable software glitches, and snowballing customer complaints. Toyota USA has recently recalled millions of late model Camrys, Corollas, RAV4s, and certain models of Lexus. Just recently it also recalled the darling of the green community, the Prius, for a problem with its regenerative brakes.

Any day now they will probably recall the Lexus IS-F for actually having some character.

Toyota Motor Philippines, by the way, assures us that its locally available models are not included in the recall. Well and good, but if there’s any Toyota model that I wish would crunch itself on a pink fence it is those white Innovas used by gun-toting bodyguards of our beloved politicians who part traffic like the Red Sea and create instant counterflow lanes. Hope they wear seatbelts, though. No offense to the Innova, but those guys are lousy endorsers. Even so, I doubt if such an incident would severely damage it. Like the N’avi in Avatar, Toyotas in my experience “are very hard to kill”.

In my first business my mentor had me drive his Lite-Ace on a company outing. Aside from having the necessary seating to accommodate our modest staff, it was an excellent team building vehicle. The aging cooling system threatened to melt down so we had to stop for cigarette breaks every thirty minutes. I never thought the drive back to Manila from Laguna could take four hours of non-airconditioned bonding, but there you go. A week and some thirty thousand pesos later the casa had fixed it up for more years of being the van I dreaded having to drive.

When I worked at a glossy magazine, the company service vehicle was a Revo. The driver, who probably has angels sitting on his shoulders, proved the Revo’s survivability many times by smashing it against walls and other vehicles as a matter of course. Eventually it was traded in for an Innova. The last time I checked most of the major body parts were still intact, both the car’s and the driver’s.

After our family Corona though, we’ve never owned a Toyota since, not out of any bad experiences but more out of expediency and wanting to try something different. I’ve test driven just about every Toyota since the start of this decade, and what can I say but that the cars are well built and predictable to a fault. If you love to drive you kind of just wish they’d make their cars more fun. My opinion, of course, hasn’t stopped neighbors, my extended family, and friends from acquiring Vioses, Altises (that’s the plural, right?), Fortuners, and Innovas without hesitation.

Any problems I’ve personally encountered were more of the curious kind than of the life-threatening.

Years ago a RAV4 I had for a weekend punished me for not quickly wearing my seatbelt by shrieking its warning beep for a whole afternoon even after I’d shut off the engine. Eventually the battery committed hara-kiri.

A taxi driver lamented to me that his 1.3-liter Vios was not as fuel efficient as he’d like. This as we flew along the C5 at 120kph.

Then there was the Camry whose center stack illumination mysteriously shut off for a few seconds and reset the clock while I was on Balete drive. Was that an electronic glitch, a figment of my imagination, or had I just been abducted by aliens?

Finally there’s the latest model of the Altis, a car so relaxing to drive that your biggest danger is falling asleep at the wheel. There’s nothing wrong with that, but who knows? Given the pressure that Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda is facing abroad, the sensationalism of the American media, and the growing number of lawyers drawn to the world’s number one car manufacturer like sharks smelling blood, anything can happen.

Maybe they will recall it again and install little metal dots around the steering wheel to send the driver an electric jolt from time to time.

Here are a couple of your Backseat Driver reactions from last week’s “Sacred Cows” by Lester Dizon…

Off with their brainless heads! Go Lester Go. – lorie624

Scared cows indeed, a terrible govt agency which needs overhauling. We motorists are supposed to receive services (for what we pay for) and not ordeals, unless you know somebody who is a big monkey… in which case, he can eat all the bananas he wants at the expense of taxpaying motorists. Excellent article, Lester. – tmp3