Lately the marketing types of the world have been calling it "brand equity," but in the real world it's always been plain old reputation. Carmakers don't get a good reputation just by showing up, they develop one over years by delivering either great or lousy products, treating customers right or like cattle and building cars people either want or ignore. Great word of mouth is a manufacturer's best asset, while a lousy rep is almost impossible to overcome.
No manufacturer is better known for building stalwart, reliable cars than Toyota. And the car that built that reputation was the Corolla.
Just about everyone seems to have a Corolla in their past. Maybe it was the beater you drove through high school, never once changing the oil, cleaning the interior or asking the squirrels to move from their nest in the trunk. Perhaps it was the first new car you bought with just 60 easy payments, or the car your grandmother drove when she decided to simplify her life in retirement. Corollas have been practically ubiquitous and never terribly exciting.
Except for the Land Cruiser, the Corolla name is the oldest in Toyota's current inventory of American products. It's also the first car Toyota made in America. And with over 30 million Corollas sold worldwide, it's the most popular car line in history.
First Generation (1968-1969)
Extreme simplicity was at the core of the first Corolla's engineering. Introduced during 1966 in Japan, the first Corolla came to the United States in the summer of 1968 riding on a 90-inch wheelbase in two-door coupe, four-door sedan and two-door wagon body styles. It was the smallest car Toyota had sold in America up until that time. A 60-horsepower, 1.1-liter overhead valve four-cylinder mounted longitudinally in the engine bay sent power to a four-speed manual transmission and then to a solid rear axle. An automatic transmission wasn't yet on the options list.
The first Corolla's unibody structure had a strut front suspension and mounted the rear axle on a pair of leaf springs. There was nothing sophisticated about the first Corolla and it wasn't pretty, but it was so simple that there were almost no parts to break.
Toyota worked hard through the '60s to overcome the then common perception that Japanese products were shoddy. And cars such as the compact Corona did an effective job of making that point. The Corolla, with prices starting under $1,700, showed that even when Toyota built a smaller, cheaper car, quality didn't suffer.