Our Cars: 1998 Toyota Avensis 1.8GS
18 October 2014: How low can you go? Life with a free car
The Details
| Current mileage | 146,100 |
|---|---|
| Actual economy | 35mpg |
By Martin Gurdon, Contributor
In the annals of dull, expedient cars, the original Toyota Avensis must make the top ten.
The outside is tedious, the inside a textbook lesson in style-free functionally. There’s a decent amount of space, the thing rides well, is mechanically refined and utterly forgettable to drive. Rather like a Marks & Spencer's sandwich, the ingredients are good but there's not much flavour.
And yet my sole mode of transport is now a 1998 Avensis 1.8 automatic, and do you know what? I don’t mind a bit, because it was free, and when a car that costs nothing and works perfectly well comes into your life when you need it, its shortcomings cease to matter.
This wasn’t a vehicle I’d ever wanted to own, but it somehow chose me. It had been a sort of secondary, dump run, weekend knocking about car for a well to do family who live in rural Kent. It had been inherited from the wife’s father, and bought new by him, so had been well cared for, first by main dealers and then a Toyota specialist, so had never suffered from penurious owners and skipped servicing.
By the middle of last year the Avensis had become surplus to requirements and a mutual friend, knowing that I often drive about in cheap old heaps, asked if I wanted it. On hearing that it was an automatic I said no, as my wife doesn’t like them much and often drives my cars, but a few months later, having been told that it was about to be carted away for scrap I relented. It seemed a shame to throw the car away.
I first met it in a rainstorm on Valentine’s Day. The owner, who was utterly charming, had told me that the battery was completely dead. I had a spare from a 1950s' 2.0 Bristol, so I brought that, along with my wife, who had been promised a romantic Valentine’s Day lunch in a pub.
My battery’s terminals were the wrong way round so wouldn’t fit, lunch was delayed and my wife became strangely quiet. The AA was called to jump-start the Avensis, whilst my beloved and I wolfed down hasty chip butties in the village boozer. So much for romance.
On returning I found the dull blue Toyota idling smoothly, headed for home and bar a flat spot when accelerating under load found it drove very well, and despite having 139,000 miles on the clock felt decidedly un-weary.
Examining the car more closely, I saw that the interior was mostly clean, but the luggage cover was missing. A breaker’s yard replacement cost £5.
Outside there were a few parking scrapes and a shallow, football-shaped ding in the nearside front wing, but otherwise the bumpers and panels were all straight and un-abused.
After dark I filled a plant spray with water, started the car and squirted the spark plug leads. Gratifyingly the engine revs dipped as little electric blue sparks danced prettily on the leads. This was the cause of the flat spot, and new leads at £35 cured it.
Ironically, all the coils and other ignition parts had been renewed before the car was laid up in an attempt to deal with the problem.
Afer that the car sat around for several months becoming a sort of shed on wheels, until I booked an MoT, which the dear old thing got through at the first attempt, and considered what to do next.
I was running a 2000, 219,000 mile, 2.0 litre VVTi Avensis estate, which was mechanically baggier, but more suited to the way my wife and I live, but just before it was due to be MoT’d the brake pedal became soft. The hydraulic side of its ABS system was identified as the culprit, it would be too expensive to justify fixing, so the younger car went to the breakers, where I stripped it of useful parts, including the steel wheels with their serviceable tyres.
I forgot to mention that the free Avensis was shod with a set of brand new winter covers, which I swapped for the estate’s regular rubber ware. The winter tyres are now sitting on their rims in our garage, waiting for the Kentish snows.
The car they came from goes like a train. On journeys from the Home Counties to Gloucestershire and even a booze-buying trip to France, it’s yet to put a foot wrong. If I can stand the boredom, I see no reason why it won’t keep going for at least a year. I’ll let you know how we get on soon.
Later: Free car foibles. Bits that work and bits that don't »
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