Now, there’s something decidedly unglamourous about it, but we have developed a little bit of love for the North American derivative of the Corolla, espcially the 4WD wagon version of it. In fact, we doubt we have or will ever feature a motor with less obvious panache.

But, being connoisseurs of affordable and accessible automotive style we think that the North American denomination of this utilitarian stalwart is a desirable ride. These ones are often seen littering the junk yards of Wisconsin lumberjacks in various nameless and mysterious TV films of the eighties. And on a number of North American blogs we have happened upon recently.

We’re not even sure if the Tercel was ever actually distributed in Europe or the UK. We seem to remember having seen their bulbous everyman loveliness around but we can’t be sure. Any ideas?

When the first real pics of Land Rover DC100 concept were released last week, there were instant catcalls of its betrayal of Land Rover’s core beliefs.

The truth is that sales of the most down-home Landy on the market and a mainstay of utility stalwarts like military and agricultural clients the world over have been spiralling downward.

With the premium SUV and family wagons market cornered in the Range and the Disco, as well as the Freelander entry level SUV having sold well, the (hugely profitable) Jaguar Land Rover company are looking to update the core.

Sure, it might look like Skoda’s Yeti from the side, and there’s a predictable rounding off, Freelander-ish aspect to the general sketch of the concept.

This release is of course just the first stage of a development that is destined to produce a production replacement for the Defender in 2015, but you can image the sort of thing that will result.

For our money, though, our favourite re-imagined offroader of the last few years has been Toyota’s retro hacker the FJ Cruiser (above). The FJ takes a very appealling reference to the original FJ Landcruisers, and updates the aesthetic for today perfectly.

Not sure if the FJ Cruiser has sold as well as the new Defender would need to, but hey. We’re just offering our humble design-centred opinion.

What do you think?

This appealing little runabout from Toyota was the product of ‘The National Car Concept’ that was created in 1955 by the very powerful Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry.

The idea was to nudge Japanese captains of industry into focussing their efforts on creating vehicles that met a number of specific requirements.

Top speed had to exceed 100 km/h; the cars kerb weight had to be below 400 kg – and fuel consumption should not exceed 1 litre/30 km at an average speed of 60 km/h on a level road.

The other significant element was full service intervals should exceed 100,000 kilometres.

You can see by the slightly Stalinist prerequisite that the ministry meant business — but it must at least in part account for the legendary reliability of most Japanese production cars.

And in the Publica’s wagon manifestation (above) the result looked kind of cute — and in the ’62 Sports concept guise (below), was downright dashing.

We’re a little bit obsessed with concept cars from the latter end of the sixties, as close readers will realise. There was something beautifully outlandish in the imagineering of car designers between 1965 and 1975 — and when you throw the Japanese aesthetic into the mix it goes bonkers.

Sure, the cultural threads of the decade when psychedelia took hold of the creative industries were just as prevalant in the far east — but what you had also in Japan was a flowering of the economic miracle that saw industry imitate, then better the vast excesses of Americana.

In many of the concepts from the seventies you can see the European influence too — with wedge-like profiles, sleekly raked pillars and sporty composure even more visible than the gravitational pull of Detroit.

Inspiration from Japanese Car Blog.

Stumbled across this interesting little video recently. It seems that the bog standard, straight out of the factory version of the AE86 was always well-disposed to kicking out the tail.

Subsequent generations of the obsessed have of course created a drift legend by welding up the diffs and weighing out the back of these mid-eighties period beauties.

In this video a Toyota team take a couple of the cars around the classic circuits of Europe with top drivers at the helm, you can see that they didn’t need any drivetrain jiggery pokery to slide nice and twistedly-like.

Reminds us that you don’t need a full aftermarket, race-specced track day monster to have fun on a racing circuit.

via JNC

Click here to view the embedded video.

Most of us realise that there is nothing remotely ‘sustainable’ or ‘environmentally friendly’ about the mass-market auto industry. Still, these global businesses are they’re doing their utmost to convince consumers that they are doing there bit to save the planet. Some are brazenly faux pious, but others have a sense of humour (of sorts) Here are a few of our faves.

This Honda Civic hybrid ad from 2006 is a classic of the happy, hipster illustrated flowers genre

For a full forty seconds, this looks like an ad for God’s creation…

Former Japanese F1 pilot Takuma Sato sends mixed messages in his Hybrid.

Ands this early Prius ad helps us recall that if you take the ‘r’ out of Prius you get something that sounds like ‘pious’

Here the new Prius falls back on the car’s design, less on the exploitation of the beauty of mountains and rivers. But the breathy female voice is still annoyingly reminiscent of a mother Mary from Midlothian…

But this controversial ‘harmony’ ad for Toyota is a little insulting to the intelligence. And to hippies.

One for the Tea Party Neocons here, shown during the Superbowl this year. Quite amusing, though.

But this Australian Smart ad takes the piety to another level. And uses children in the process.

It’s comfornting to know that there’s a new hot launch on the way that’s not either stratospheric and ridiculous (think Aston 177, or Lexus LFA) or pious and overly eco-righteous (think almost everything else).

Next month’s Geneva salon may contain more of the polarised world of new car launches, but at Least the FT-86 is a dynamic little speedster that will be (sort of) accessible to mere mortals.

The five-seat FT-86 (Hachi Roku according to Jap car fetishists) goes back to the fundamental qualities of the classic sports car with its rear-wheel drive configuration, compact dimensions, low centre of gravity and lightweight construction. Under the bonnet there is a 2.0-litre boxer engine that is strong on both performance as well as efficiency.

The show car’s bodywork is finished in Flash Red, an eye-catching shade that contains a hint of blue. Inside, the cabin design further expresses the car’s classic sporting qualities with many of the structural elements left uncovered.

It’s still only a concept, of course, but it’s continual unveiling gives a hint that we could expect to see the car available, and probably not for too kingly a ransom, before we’re too old to enjoy such a thing.

Here’s hoping.

There’s a good reason why DCI Gene Hunt drives the cars he does in Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes. Few things scream seventies louder than a golden-brown Mark III Ford Cortina, or eighties louder than a red Audi Quattro. Iconic, instantly-recognizable cars like this are easy cultural shorthand for their era. Stick one on screen and your eye is immediately drawn to it. And if you make the car the star, maybe the TV company has to spend a little bit less on props and street scenes to make its drama feel properly period.

Iconic cars represent their era, but they reflect it too. Much as we’d like the car to exist in a bubble, unaffected by the trends and crises of the outside world, it just can’t. The car shapes the world: along with the computer and industrialized warfare, the car was one of the biggest influences on the last century. Our lifestyles and our physical environment are organized around it, but it influences the culture too. The freedom offered by the internal combustion engine, whether fitted to a car or a motorbike, has energized music, art, literature and whole youth movements.

And in turn, the cars we drive are influenced by their times in exactly the same way as the clothes we wear and the music we listen to. Think of a fifties American car, and what do you see? A tail fin. What does a tail fin represent? The jet age: a period of intense technological and economic optimism – in America at least – in which speed and power were so venerated, and advancing so fast, that the cars started to look like planes, and the planes turned into the rockets that would take us into space. Car design of the period reflects that so perfectly that if you show someone a tailfin now, they’ll smell a drive-thru hotdog and hear a Chuck Berry record.

Look at the work of designers like Harley Earl at General Motors and Virgil Exner at Chrysler: one sounds like a rock’n’roller, the other like a character from a period sci-fi puppet show, but together they gave us some of the most exuberant car design ever seen, culminating in Earl’s ’59 Cadillac Eldorado, his final and most outrageous work. And what did we get in austere fifties Britain? A steady diet of grim, grey, porridge saloons, with the apologetically-befinned Ford Anglia 105E only arriving in the same year they launched – almost literally – that Cadillac. Case closed.

Same applies in the sixties. More than the Lamborghini Miura or the Jaguar E-type, I’d argue that the original Mini and Fiat 500 are the iconic cars of that decade: partly because their accessibility put millions more on wheels, but also because they reflect the classlessness of the time; a Mini might have been your first car, but the Beatles and Peter Sellers drove them too.

Seventies? Harder to identify an icon, but that just proves the point. Beset by recessions and oil crises, the car industry lacked the confidence it had in the previous two decades, and it shows in the cars it produced; there were some great supercars like the awesome, angular Countach, but from makers which lurched from owner to official receiver and often lacked the cash to put the wheels on. There was a definite seventies look – Hunt’s Cortina being the perfect European example – but few stand-out cars. Frightened by the price of petrol and the threat of the sack, people wanted reliability and affordability in everything; this was the quartz watch decade. In cars, in the US, this mood killed the big-block V8 engine. In Europe and Japan, it spawned the hatchback; VW launched the Golf, and Toyota’s Corolla broke out of Japan and began its ascent to become the world’s best-selling model.

Things were better in the eighties: greed was good, and made near-200mph supercars like the Ferrari F40 and Porsche 959 both socially acceptable and economically viable. The Quattro and hot hatches made a little of that mojo available to those not in receipt of a Gordon Gecko-sized bonus.

Nineties and noughties? Maybe we’re still too close to spot the real icons, and what they say about the times. The nineties produced arguably the greatest car ever made in the McLaren F1, but recessions and economic crises in Asia and Latin America brought the uncertainty back: for all its incandescent performance, only 71 road-going F1s were sold.

Autocar magazine’s readers have just voted the current Range Rover the car of the noughties, but I’d disagree; by the time the decade ended the zeitgeist had turned so decisively against big SUVs that – for all its ability – I think it gets disqualified. Instead, I’d nominate the Prius. As a hybrid in a unique bodyshell, not only is it arguably green, but it’s obviously, visually green. That’s why diCaprio and Diaz are always seen in theirs. It tells other people you’re doing your bit, even though you’re still driving a car and probably haven’t altered the rest of your lifestyle much.

How noughties is that? Maybe, thirty years hence, when the BBC makes a retro cop-drama set in 2009, the lead character PC PC will drive a Prius, but decline to get into car chases because they’re ‘just not sustainable’.

At the first hint of falling snow, thoughts turn to utility as the prime motivator of automotive choice. Of course the SUV genre has had some killer bad press over the last couple of years. They don’t make sense for most of the year, but in these days of proper winters, they certainly have their place. And right now, with food and gifts to shop, kids to transport to seasonal festivity: which one of us wouldn’t want a big lump of Iron driven at all four corners in our driveway?

Here are our three faves.

As well as the classic Volvo take on utility as encapsulated in the Volvo 445 Duett (top) there a host of other early practical vehicles and offroaders that float our aesthetic as well as shed-haunting, daddish sensibilities. The Landcruiser FJ 40 (above, is an obviously delectable classic – but for us, even the tarted-up version of the humble and perennial Landrover Defender (below) is more than a little worthy of desire.

If Rudolph ever did run out of steam, then surely Santa would choose on the these stylishly workaday whips for his yuletide deliveries.

No sooner had Toyota announced the advent of the long-awaited FT-86 supercar, than the digital rumour mill had begun to grind out the preposterous idea that that Subaru would also be offering a version of this prodigal child –  and a bigger, badder, faster version to boot.

According to various sources out there on the WWW, it seems that a turbocharged, 4WD version of the FT86 with the scooby magic has been confirmed as the Subaru A 216.

It has been known for a while that the two companies have been collaborating on the development of the the new model, but sources close to the industry have revealed finally that there will be clear water between the Toyota badged manifestation of the car and that bearing Subaru’s five stars.

As well as different model codings, the Subaru version will be driven by a 2-litre turbo, probably in the shape of an evolution of the lump that powers the Impreza 2.0 GT. Look out, also, for the inevitable STi version someowhere down the line. The 216’s body will be fatter, wider and longer, and of course the extra drive train metalwork will inevitably add a substantial bit of weight.

Prices haven’t as yet been released, but we reckon it would make sense for the scooby to sit somewhere around the £60K mark, broadly in line with the Nissan’s delectable GT-R.

Thanks to 7Tune for the scout.