Recently, we learned that the very last new car sold in North America with the storied four-on-the-floor manual transmission was the 1996 Toyota Tercel. For the 1994 through 1996 model years, the Tercel was your only choice for a new car with a four-speed manual, and I’ve managed to find one of those extremely rare cars during my junkyard explorations. Here’s a zero-option ’95 in a Denver-area yard.
The Tercel of this era was a sturdy (if boring) transportation appliance, and the ’95 was by far the cheapest new Toyota car Americans could buy that year ($10,348 versus $12,498 for a 5-speed Corolla, though a stripped-down 1995 Toyota Pickup aka Hilux also sported a $10,348 price tag). Meanwhile, a new Ford Aspire cost $8,440, a Hyundai Accent cost $8,455, a Geo Metro cost $7,894, and a Suzuki Swift cost $8,699. Even the Neon went for just $9,500 that year, and Honda would sell you a frill-delete Civic CX for $9,750. I think I’d have gone with the last year of the US-market Hilux rather than the 4-speed Tercel, if I’m honest (the new Tacoma shoved the Hilux aside during 1995).
Air conditioning was a 900-buck option on the ’95 Tercel, and you can see the socket where the AC button would have lived in the photo above. That factory-looking CD player seems like an incongruous squandering in such a penny-pinching car, but it turns out to be the no-doubt-junkyard-sourced original head unit from an early-2000s Nissan Altima. Buyers of the base-grade 1995 Tercel had no CD-player option (you had to move up to the Tercel DX for that), but they could splash out a big $450 for a four-speaker AM/FM/cassette system if they’d lost their presence of mind at the dealership. You got no standard radio whatsoever in the base Tercel; if you wanted music on a tight Tercel budget, you had to sing it yourself.
The 1.5-liter (actually more like 1.45-liter) straight-four in this car made 93 horsepower, and these cars weren’t any fun at all with automatic transmissions. With a manual, even the lowly four-speed, you could squeeze a tiny bit of driving enjoyment out of the later Tercels.
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