Owner wants to crush his 1977 Toyota 1000

I'm sure someone over here would take it off his hands, instead of him throwing his toys out of the pram.

Glad I am not a member on there. WTF is the bloke’s problem? He has scrapped his car in protest at the cost (170 notes) of lower balljoints from Toyota? Then he witters on about ‘I loved that car but Toyota are just not interested in helping me’, what a complete bum-shoveller. He seems to think Toyota is obliged to help him keep his car on the road for ever with subsidised bits FFS.

He should try driving a fuggin Fiat or something, you go into a Fiat dealer asking for parts for a 30-year old model and they will just laugh in your face. I bet his balljoints are available within 48hours or something.

If availability of cheap bits is all that he measures the classic-owning experience on he should get himself an MGB.

Verdict: Tosser.

Some Ford Dealers can't even remember what a MK3 Escort looks like.

member Street on this forum encounted this situation with his Ford dealer.

This bit made me laugh out loud:

"they did not even bother to reply to a courteous letter to the General Manager asking to meet me half way on cost."

What a fool! I think even the most enthusiastic of dealership managers would draw the line at giving a 50% discount just because he happens to own a classic.

He will probably end up with a new car paying out the price of those ball-joints in monthly installments..... chump

What a pleb! That guy doesn't deserve to own a cool and interesting car.



Talk about cutting your nose off to spite your face

I think there is one of these on ebay at the moment.

The guy's a bloody eejit. If you need easy parts availibility buy a modern car, on an old car it's a bonus! He should try having a Hillman Imp, the company that made them no longer exists, and the site of the factory the bits were coming from is now a warehouse, an empty industrial estate and a line of haulage yards, so you're not likely to find brand new parts for an Imp, we have to track down parts the hard way! ;D (Admittedly the club and specialist support is pretty good for Hillman Imps but you still have to get lots secondhand.) I'm sure it's the same way with most classics, even with classic Volvos I reckon Volvo are doing people a favour by still building some parts for the 2 and 7 series, and they can hardly be blamed for not having a huge stock of such parts lying around everywhere (slightly less so parts specific to the 9 series because the last of those are only ten years old so there are still some in service as everyday, non enthusiast-owned hacks, minicabs and the like) but you still have to get your hands dirty and go to the local scrappy or else keep your eyes peeled in the magazines and on ebay if you want some stuff, I can't imagine why this guy thinks it should be any different for his Toyota, that Toyota should have thousands of 77 Corolla balljoints just waiting to be offloaded at bargain prices and can always make more if they run out?

Now I may be a ranting commie type, but even I know that it isn't all that cost efficient for a car company to keep and renew all its tooling for every single component on every car it's ever built in its history, just in case some swine wants new balljoints for his 70s Corolla. I understand perfectly the conditions of owning an old car, one of those being that you can't expect to be able to get every part brand new and mass produced at a bargain price, because no company could afford to stay affloat if they did that, for a start to keep everything in even limited production they'd need a massive factory and a collosal army of workers, which would just drive production costs back up again. Clearly what the guy needs is a modern diesel Avensis or something, either that or a good kick in the balljoints.

Was that price including fitting? Even if it wasn't it's still not exactly extortion.

Guy sounds like a total twonk. I'll bet that he doesn't crush it at all. But will instead put it in his garden & leave it to rot, telling anyone who's interested that it's 'very rare & worth a fortune' as it slowly turns into £5 worth of oxide.

That sums it up for me. Years ago I ran Minis exclusively. People would criticize and say that they were unreliable, rotten old wrecks. My retort was that this was only because they were cheap to buy and run so people couldn't justify spending anything on maintenance and repairs, hence the cars became unreliable, rotten old wrecks. When properly looked after, Minis are as reliable as any other car on the road. The same can be said for most old cars.