Japan’s ultimate ‘chick magnet’ car flys the coop
Sunday Mainichi (4/30)
First released onto the market in 1970, the Celica’s stylish design and affordable price soon saw it labeled as Japan’s preferred “date car.”
But the Celica wasn’t all about looks, either, with the car forming the basis of Toyota’s successful World Rally Championship teams, including the three driver’s championship titles the automaker collected in the ’90s.
“The Celica sold itself on being a stylish car, but young people nowadays won’t buy a car just because it looks cool,” a car magazine’s chief editor tells Sunday Mainichi. “As you can tell from the large numbers of SUVs and mini-vans on the roads, times are different now and tastes have changed.”
Toyota last changed the Celica’s design in 1999, which was the seventh version of popular sporty sedan. Toyota sold 850,000 Celicas in Japan alone and, up until this spring, another 4.17 million in the rest of the world. But Celica sales in Japan last year dropped to just 1,600 vehicles and the one-time mainstay of the country’s biggest automaker was dropped from the production line, a fate that had already befallen the Celica in North America last year.
What has attracted attention about Toyota’s decision to dump the Celica was that archrival Nissan has scored a hit by reviving the Fairlady Z and Skyline, both contemporaries of the Celica. Some suggest that Toyota could have done the same for its once reliable seller.
“Nissan really did well by promoting its vehicles as sports cars that even mature drivers could enjoy getting behind the wheel in,” the car rag editor tells Sunday Mainichi. “Next year, huge numbers of Baby Boomers will retire. These are the people who enjoyed driving the Celica in their younger days. It’d be interesting to see how well a ‘New Celica’ targeting retiring Baby Boomers would go in the market.”
Having just taken the painful decision to stop making the once sleek and sexy Celica, it hardly seems likely to be in line for a comeback. At least, not yet.
“It’s hard to say what’s going to happen from now,” a Toyota spokesman tells Sunday Mainichi. “And that includes discussion over whether to revive the name.” (By Ryann Connell)
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