The Ultra-Obscure Toyota Classic is the Brand’s Weirdest Car You’ve Never Heard Of

A while ago, we brought you the story of the Toyota Origin, a retro-styled JDM oddity launched by Toyota in 2000 to celebrate the fact it had built 100 million cars. Based on the chassis of the Japanese-market Progrès saloon, it packed a 2JZ engine and styling that referenced the original 1950s Crown, Toyota’s first full-scale mass-production car.

It was just the sort of thing a Japanese car company would build for its highly unique home market, but it’s arguably not even Toyota’s weirdest retro car. No, we’d wager that that honour goes to something that arrived four years before it, in 1996: the Toyota Classic.

This is undoubtedly one of the most obscure Toyota models of all time. Just 100 were built, and because it has a name that was conceived before SEO was a thing, most attempts to dig up information on it simply return general information on classic Toyotas. Great if you want to find out more about, say, the 2000GT, but less so if you’re trying to get the inside line on the actual Toyota Classic.

Here’s what we do know about it, though: the Classic was built to celebrate 60 years since Toyota launched its first production car, 1936’s AA. Responsibility for the bodywork was handed over to Toyota Technocraft, an in-house specialist conversion division perhaps best known for producing rare, JDM-only full soft-top convertible versions of the first- and second-gen MR2s.

Technocraft did a respectable job of translating the AA’s looks over onto modern underpinnings. It had separate headlights, running boards, whitewall tyres, a boot-mounted spare wheel – the whole shebang. Arguably, it should be classified as a ‘neo-classic’ car rather than a retro one – an attempt to build a car that actually looks old, rather than having a modern design that references a classic. However, this was still a ’90s car on ’90s underpinnings, and there’s only so much it could do to hide that.

Those underpinnings are perhaps a little unexpected. Underneath the Classic’s ’30s-aping looks was the workhorse ladder chassis of a Hilux, and yes, we’re also imagining turning one of these into the world’s least likely off-road build.  The powertrain came from a Hilux too, and arguably came close to offering authentic 1930s performance. The engine was the 3Y-E, a single overhead valve 2.0-litre four-cylinder developing all of 96bhp, which was sent to the rear wheels through a four-speed auto.

The interior was a similar mish-mash of old and new. On the one hand, you had a polished woodgrain dash and a wood-rimmed Nardi steering wheel; on the other, you had ’90s creature comforts like a tape player and air-con.

With the Classic only supplied in tiny qualities to Japan, and arriving when the internet was still in its infancy, concrete information on things like price and sales is vanishingly difficult to come by. Only by looking through the references on the car’s Japanese-language Wikipedia page do we find one article suggesting it was priced new at ¥8 million, the equivalent of around £37,000 today. Perhaps even more fascinatingly, this same article also notes that in 2000, Technocraft went on to produce the TC Pickup, a special-order pickup version of the Classic, and a vehicle so obscure it takes a bit of digging to even find visual confirmation of its existence.

So, the Classic really is obscure given it was a fully-fledged model sold by the world’s biggest car company not all that long ago – and it’s unquestionably one of the strangest cars ever to wear Toyota badges.