Ah, Japan, the mythical land that is really like no other. Rich in culture, interesting food and quite possibly the most technologically advanced country on Earth, well to most people at least. However, for people like us, Japan is a shrine for some of the most influential cars of all time.
If you go back into the pages of Japanese car history, you’ll find an endless amount of pages from every single manufacturer showing their most prized possession. Nissan with their Skyline, Honda with their NSX and Mitsubishi with the Evo. But what about Toyota and their Supra? I’m willing to bet that Toyota reckons their most influential car is the Corolla.
Yes, the humble little Corolla. Why, you may ask? It’s because Toyota has sold over 50,000,000 units of the Corolla throughout its whole 55-year history, as of July 2021, making it the current record holder for the best-selling car in the world. As a way to celebrate this amazing feat, Toyota will be releasing a variant called the Corolla 50 Million Edition as well as a manga strip to celebrate this milestone.
Of Course It’ll Be A Manga
Toyota has released a series of five manga strips with the Corolla being the main star. It shows how the car has evolved throughout the decades with the stories being crafted by real life photos shared by Corolla owners.
The Corolla was first introduced in 1966 with the ‘E10’ designation, a car that basically put Toyota on the map. The E10 is also one of the stars in the Japanese manga strip, which starts off in a 60’s setting about a father coming home in a first-generation Corolla E10 to take his family out for a drive.
The story then continues through the 1970s where a father and his son appear to have a very tense conversation while traveling in an E20 generation. In the next manga, it goes into the next decade with the iconic AE86 where a girl seems to be upset that her husband/boyfriend is spending a lot of time with the car, however she then later understood why he loved the car and was supportive of him.
The fourth manga strip features the E100 Corolla set in the 90s where a man drives his family to a mall to eat ice cream. In the fifth and final manga strip, we see the modern day E210 Corolla (the same one we drove a couple of months back) with a girl. It is unknown why Toyota skipped the Corolla from the 2000s and 2010s but the idea of the manga is pretty neat though.
