Celica GT4 ST185
My fifteenth car – Toyota Celica GT4
The year was 2016, I decided to buy a modern car as I had been driving old cars all my life and it was time to own something I could just drive, something that would not fog up when it rained, something that would not need constant tinkering. But I still wanted something that was a proper car, not some sort of shopping trolley, I didn’t want a truck, I didn’t want a front wheel drive car, I didn’t want am automatic car, I didn’t want something that would be embarrassing to own, something that would make me want to wind the window down in traffic and call out to the car next to me, “hey mate, this is not mine, I’ve borrowed it.” That left me with a very small selection, a Ford Falcon, a Holden Commodore, but they were big cars and finding a manual would be near on impossible. Then there were the four wheel drive cars, Subaru Impreza or Celica GT4. I started searching, the internet, which had replaced the Trading Post as the way to find cars for sale, car For Sale web sites, Face Book market place, Gumtree etc. I would search them each day, Subaru Impreza’s were a bit pricy and Celica’s were a bit scarce, but eventually I found a Celica in a car yard, so I court the train down and had a look at it and ended up buying it, not one of my greatest decisions.
It ended up needing a lot of work, which I did some off myself and payed others to do the rest, in the end it was a nice car, it was great to drive, I loved the turbo, the power steering, the air conditioning, the image, it was a cool car, like the TR7, it made me feel good just by sitting in it. But it had a problem, a problem that showed its self early on, sometimes for no apparent reason it would not start, but after a while, sometime just as I was about to ring the NRMA, and other time after the NRMA had arrived. At first it was, may be once a year, but as time went on, it got worse, to the point where I did not want to drive it. I took it to a mechanic, and said, “fix it”, as I wanted to keep it, so I was prepared to spend money, but I had to balance how much I spent, if it was not fixed, I needed to have enough money to buy another car. Once the mechanic got to $4,000 in labour cost and it still was not fixed I had to pull the plug, I sold it. I sold it with full discloser of the problem, but because it was a GT4, I still got a good prise for it, which, when added to the money I had, gave me a budget of around ten to twelve thousand to buy another car.
The new owner contacted me a few days later to tell me that he had found the problem, it was some sort of anti theft device that was faulty, so he removed it, problem fixed. It also needed a thing called an Air Flow meter, with that, it was fix and running again. I owner the Celica for, I think, six years, it was a driver’s car, you could drive along quietly, but if you put your foot down, it turned into a hairy chested monster, sit back in the seat and hold on. With the Celica gone, I was back with the same problem that I had before buying the Celica, what to buy next?
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