I found one of the old comments and wholly agree with its message: https://carspiritpk.com/toyota-corona-the-rise-fall/#comment-7609

At its launch time, the ’80 Corolla was reminiscent of Mercedes with its quad-light setup. When the last facelift with rectangular headlights came, it also had a new and artistic style of taillights – a major upgrade over the previous simplistic shape (can be seen in the red Corolla in the photos above) – teenagers and senior citizens were alike drooling over it all the way from the rich-class to the poor-class.

As recently as 2000-2010, the ’80 Corolla could be seen doing drifts retrofitted with 4A-GE engines.

The Corolla originally came with the 4K engine, it had slant cylinders just like the Suzuki Bolan’s F8B. At that time the B310 Nissan Sunny with its A12 engine was considered technically superior to the Corolla, because it had a vertical engine which lived longer before asking for an overhaul. The Nissan was a fuel sipper and it was a common alteration to retrofit the Nissan’s carburettor into the Corolla, here … I dug out the previous mention of this phenomenon https://carspiritpk.com/remembering-datsun-120y/#comment-5209.

Amongst the families we knew in our childhood, one of them had a Corona RT100, one of them had a KE70 Corolla, one had the B310 Sunny. I’m not much of a Toyota-stan and I always liked the Sunny better.

For me, the most important parameter of any car is my ability to stretch my legs in any seat, and for that the Datsun was much better. It was much cheaper than the Toyota while offering more features, lower fuel consumption and a smoother engine+gear. The Toyotas were upscale with quad-headlights and other elements of visual appeal. The Toyotas also came with luxurious beige interiors while the Datsun had a black one.

But in this time and day, these things are good only for the nostalgia factor. Today I’ll take a new Alto, which offers more legroom, more comfort, more features, more power, more pickup, more speed, more safety and more fuel economy than any of these.