The first Toyota built in North America — a white Corolla FX16 — is assembled at New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. in Fremont, Calif., on Oct. 7, 1986, following several months of pilot production.
NUMMI was a joint venture formed by Toyota and General Motors Corp. in 1984. Toyota, after decades of steady U.S. sales growth with imports, was eager to learn how to build cars in the U.S. GM wanted to learn how to build world-class vehicles in the country using lean production techniques.
The Corolla went on sale in Japan on Nov. 5, 1966, marking the beginning of what has become the world’s top-selling car nameplate.
The FX16 was based on Toyota’s fifth-generation Corolla and featured a front-wheel-drive chassis. There was a base model and a the sporty GT-S variant that featured four-wheel-independent suspension, power rack-and-pinion steering and four disc brakes.
It was slotted on a 95.7-inch wheelbase, was 160 inches long and had a curb weight of 2,366 pounds.
The FX16 was a three-door hatchback with simple lines and large windows that resembled the Corolla sedan in several ways. Smooth composite headlamps straddled a thin grille strip. The bumper was broken up by a series of six openings, set low, to add a sense of width.
Car and Driver called the motor — a 1.6-liter, twin-cam, 16-valve, fuel-injected four-cylinder that produced 108 hp at 6,600 rpm — the heart and soul of the FX16.
“The gearbox is so slick, as we’ve come to expect from Toyota, that it feels as if it were machined from solid billets of Teflon,” the magazine wrote in September 1986. “We wonder what kind of shift-mechanism secrets Toyota possesses that the rest of the car world can’t seem to copy. The five-speed is further blessed with close-ratio gears, exploiting the engine’s high-revving capabilities.”