Toyota Corolla Problems

While the sedan sold alongside the hatchback version of the Corolla in Australia, the hatchback easily outsold the sedan. And that’s pretty much the reason you still see a lot of hatchbacks getting around, but sedans are thin on the ground. They just didn’t sell in the same numbers back in the day. Fundamentally, buyers were much more likely to go for the extra practicality of the hatchback layout.

Of course, that’s in Australia. In some other markets (China, for example) the sedan version of a particular make and model is often more popular than the hatchback variant. It’s a cultural thing, in essence.

The Corolla of this vintage has a fine reputation as a vehicle unlikely to fail in such a spectacular way. Assuming, as you say, the servicing has been by the book and the car has not been abused, used to tow massive loads, or operated as a rally car, then the suspicion is that the crankshaft of this particular example may have contained a casting or material fault from day one. This wouldn’t be visible to the people who assembled the engine, but could lead to such a failure after a period of time.

I’d be inclined to talk to Toyota Australia’s customer service department to see if there’s any financial or mechanical help on offer to repair your vehicle. Even though your vehicle is out of warranty, you might find Toyota will be as horrified as you at such a major failure at such low kilometres and will do something about it. Assuming that a manufacturing flaw is, indeed, the cause of the failure.

If you don’t get anywhere but wish to pursue it, an independent examination by an appropriate engineer might be able to pin-point the cause of the failure, at which point you might have another bargaining chip. Certainly a broken crankshaft at 62,000km is neither normal nor acceptable.

The space-saver from a non-hybrid Corolla should fit your car, provided it’s from a model from the same generation of Corolla. Don’t forget, though, you’ll also need the correct jack and wheel brace to change a tyre by the side of the road.

The bigger question perhaps, is where you’d store the spare tyre and tools on a Corolla Hybrid. The reason the hybrid model doesn’t have a spare tyre in the first place is that the hybrid’s batteries take up an awful lot of space under the boot floor, where the tyre would otherwise live. Meantime, having a tyre and tools rattling around loose in the hatch area is not only an inconvenience but, in a crash, could be potentially lethal.

Both are regarded as great choices as a used car, so it will really come down to whether you need the extra interior space of the Camry over the practicality of the Corolla’s hatchback layout.

With your budget, you might be able to get into a Camry Hybrid which will reduce running costs around town (which suits your suggested usage pattern) although these early Camry Hybrids can be more than a decade old now, so a close check of the condition of the batteries would be a mandatory pre-purchase requirement.

The Corolla, meanwhile, was first seen here in hybrid form in 2016, and those cars are still closer to mid-$20,000, so possibly out of your range. The exception is a grey (private) import Corolla Hybrid, but these can be a bit more of a lottery than a locally delivered Toyota.

If the car won’t accelerate beyond 40km/h, it could be because it has gone into limp-home mode in order to protect itself from further damage. If so, that’s possibly because there’s a major problem somewhere in the driveline. But the chainsaw noise is pretty worrying, too, and suggests that something is rubbing on something else that shouldn’t be.

The best advice is to not drive the car any farther until it’s been checked by a mechanic. Continuing to drive it risks doing more damage to whatever is already wrong with it.

Even though your car has a hybrid driveline, the bit that runs on petrol uses the same technology as any other Toyota petrol engine. So E10 is fine according to Toyota, although it also says 10 per cent (hence E10) is the highest percentage of ethanol you should consider using. Likewise, 95 RON petrol presents no problems.

On older cars like this one, some pretty strange electrical things can start to happen as switches and wiring ages. The first thing to check for is that there’s not a cargo area or interior light staying on when it shouldn’t and subsequently flattening the battery.

But the failure of the stereo and temperature gauge both point to a body computer problem (as does the battery going flat). The body computer basically controls all the car’s functions that are not driveline related. So, the central locking, lighting, entertainment, security, power windows, climate control and much, much more are body-computer driven. And if this computer fails, lights can turn themselves on, the central locking can cycle over and over again and various other electrical bits and pieces can switch themselves on and drain the battery.

But there’s one other check to make before blaming the computer (which, on a 1994 Corolla, won’t be as complex as one on a more modern car), which is to make sure there are no bad earths on the car. Failing gauges are a common symptom of a bad earth somewhere on the car, and if that’s the case, you might find this is also causing the starting problems by not allowing the battery to fully charge when the car is driven.