Rockin' Supercar: The Rebirth, Short Life, and Death of a Shark-Fin-Equipped '85 Toyota Tercel Wagon

Sometimes a very ordinary car becomes something special, maybe even loved, but that's not always enough to keep it out of the jaws of the crusher. This is the story of a second-gen Toyota Tercel wagon (known in Japan as the Sprinter Carib) and its journey from auction to lumber-hauler to kid transportation to a Chinese steel factory.

Around the turn of the century, while I was working at a doomed dot-com in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood, I discovered that the city auctioned off all the unclaimed tow-away cars every week at nearby Pier 70. Hundreds of cars every week, the result of San Francisco's ruthless, revenue-centric approach to unpaid parking tickets and official anti-car policies. No keys in the cars, no attempt made to start them, plenty of dirty needles and burnt spoons in the sketchier ones, and 15 minutes to inspect them all before deciding to bid.

This was the Wild West era of City Tow, with big-city bottom-dealing sharpsters skimming the choicest cars for connected insiders and Hunter's Point gang-bangers buying up all the box Caprices. You could get 15-year-old Japanese subcompacts (that probably ran) for a hundred bucks. I would leave work early on Tuesday, ride my bike over to Pier 70 with a backpack full of tools and a couple hundred bucks in my pocket, buy a Tercel or Sentra, throw the bike in the back, get it to run well enough to drive it the 10 miles to my place, fix any serious problems with junkyard parts, get a smog check, and sell it for a grand. Buy, fix, sell, repeat.

I settled on the second-gen Tercel wagon as my car of choice; they always ran, they're easy to work on, junkyard parts were plentiful, and they sold fast to car shoppers looking for something cheap and useful. The third or fourth one I bought was this blue front-wheel-drive '85 with tiger-skin seat covers. It was missing first and second gear and the clutch was just about dead (obviously the last owner had been starting out in third gear for quite a while), but I got it home and swapped in a $45 junkyard transmission and a new clutch.

I decided to hang onto this car for a while, because I wanted to do some major upgrades to my tiny, ramshackle Gold Rush Era cottage in Alameda and I needed a vehicle to haul lumber and sacks of concrete. The Tercel proved to be an amazingly competent pack mule, at one point swallowing 1,500 pounds of concrete sacks and a portable cement mixer and hauling it all across town on the bump stops.

The blue Tercel with the tiger-skin seats delivered all the stuff to build a storage shed with slab floor, a redwood deck in the back yard, an anti-earthquake shear wall, and some other projects. I installed a halfway-decent stereo and toyed with the idea of keeping the car… but then I picked up an ex-San Joaquin County Sheriff's P71 Crown Victoria (complete with urine test kits and evidence Polaroids) and I had no room in my crowded urban driveway for it. A childhood friend who lived down the street had a kid who was about to start first grade. The friend's previous car had just died after a downward spiral of deferred maintenance, and she needed something child-friendly and -- ideally -- neglect-proof. So, I sold her the Tercel for a very reasonable price.

All of Daisy's classmates were being ferried to and from school in the usual affluent-Bay-Area-parent machinery -- Priuses, Volvo wagons, Audi Allroads, various Japanese minivans -- and the elderly Tercel lacked that special something that would let her hold her head high when being dropped off at school by her struggling-freelance-artist single mom. "What this car needs is a big shark fin on the roof!" I suggested, and then spent an afternoon making it happen. The nice thing about a car like this is that you can drill holes in the roof without flinching.

With that, the car became an instant legend at the grade school. Kids would chase after the Sharkmobile, squealing in admiration, and 6-year-old Daisy named it the Rockin' Supercar. For about 18 months, the Rockin' Supercar made Daisy the envy of the kids being chauffeured in cars that cost 100 times as much… but then cold, hard reality caught up with with the old Toyota. Daisy's mom was a bit scattered when it came to car maintenance, and she had some idea that getting an oil change meant that she never had to check the oil again. She also paid no attention to the burnt-out OIL idiot light, and so I got this phone call: "Hey, the Rockin' Supercar started to make this clattering noise, so I turned up the radio, and then it made a REALLY LOUD clattering noise, and then all this smoke came out and it just stopped." Yep, the poor abused 3A-C engine had run out of oil and then thrown a connecting rod.

I thought about installing a junkyard engine in the Rockin' Supercar, but it just wasn't worth fixing up a battered, 21-year-old Tercel, no matter how beloved by a heartbroken 6-year-old. It sat in the driveway for a while, but eventually the time came for it to take that last tow-truck ride. Bye bye, Rockin' Supercar!

I grabbed the battery, the speakers, and some other electrical bits before the Rockin' Supercar went away, because I was about to build the now-legendary Junkyard Boogaloo Boombox and I needed those parts for the project. In fact, some of those Rockin' Supercar parts still live on in the JBB, which now serves as the heart of my garage entertainment center. As for the rest of the car… well, I knew where I'd find it, a few months after it got towed away.

It's always a weird, sad feeling when you see a car you once owned at your local self-service wrecking yard. A few pieces were bought by junkyard shoppers, but the Rockin' Supercar went to the crusher, the shredder, the Port of Oakland, and a container ship bound for Guangzhou with most of its parts.

Sometimes I think I should have hung onto this car, or at least put a new engine in it after the rod-throw incident, but you can't save them all. Bye bye, Rockin' Supercar!

By Murilee Martin