Importing a car from Japan can easily involve sifting through a catalog of weirdness. You could buy an Autozam AZ-1, an insect-sized mid-engined sports car with gullwing doors. You could also buy a Honda S-MX, an asymmetric car explicitly designed for hookups. You could even buy a Daihatsu Mira Walk-through Van, which looks a bit like a 4/6-scale Toyota Tercel wearing a shed. However, I recently stumbled upon something that trumps the lot. It’s a beige Toyota Camry with cloth seats and a dent on the side, up for sale on Canada’s west coast.
On the face of it, this Camry is basically identical to the ones you can find in every zip code. It’s beige, it’s a 2005 model, it’s even the North American-style wide Camry rather than any funky JDM variant. Under the hood sits the same 2AZ-FE 2.4-liter naturally-aspirated four-cylinder engine that came standard in America at the time. It’s hitched to the same five-speed automatic gearbox offered in North America, driving the front wheels.
As far as exterior condition goes, this Camry appears to be in good shape, but not outstanding shape. The fog lights haven’t turned opaque from years of ultraviolet radiation and road grit, which is more than you can say about most 18-year-old regular cars. Actually, if your fog lights are looking haggard, I’d recommend just replacing the assemblies since they’re dirt-cheap for most cars. I think I paid $30 for E90 fog lights with bulbs. Anyway, what were we talking about again? Oh yeah, the Camry. It’s got a few bumps and scrapes but no egregious rust or anything, which means it’s probably good transportation for years to come.
Moving to the cabin, this Camry appears to basically be analogous to our XLE model, save for its cloth upholstery. It’s decked out with automatic climate control, a now-useless navigation system, a leather-wrapped steering wheel, and woodgrain trim from the reddest of trim factories. Aside from power-folding mirrors, it doesn’t offer huge equipment perks over the Camry models we got here, which shouldn’t be surprising because it’s a Camry.
This is the stealth mode of JDM cars, a wholly anonymous and baffling choice that most people won’t bat an eye at. Rarely has a JDM car blended into North American traffic so well. It’s impressively boring, the sort of machine Akio Toyoda railed against when he approved such cars as the GR Supra and GR Corolla. It’s so uninteresting it’s interesting, a ton of effort put towards securing a predictable outcome. Think about how far this Camry has traveled, how much of the world it’s seen.
So why would anyone import a Camry like this from Japan? It only takes a glance at the odometer to find out. If the dashboard is accurate, this monument to normalcy has covered just 24,943 kilometers, or 15,499 miles, since new. Not bad for a car that’s listed for $8,000 Canadian, or $5,877 in greenbacks. In today’s crazy car market, where else are you finding a low-mileage Camry for such little money? Sure, it’s not the most exciting car in the world, but it’s famed for reliability and it should be easy to service anywhere in North America.
While bringing an exceedingly normal Toyota Camry halfway across the world isn’t the most daring choice one could make, this particular example seems unusually sensible on the face of things. It’s the sort of vehicle that could be a star a smaller car meet, yet come without the hassle of sourcing rare parts from a land off yonder. Perhaps that makes it the smart choice, the thrill of something different without any of the pain.
(Photo credits: Facebook Marketplace seller)
Support our mission of championing car culture by becoming an Official Autopian Member.
-
I Saw The 2024 Toyota Tacoma And It’s A Huge Leap Forward
-
Toyota Should Absolutely Revive The Celica
-
The 2023 Manual Toyota GR Supra Is Now The Car It Should’ve Been
-
Legendary Toyota Tuner Tom’s Racing Now Has An Outrageous WRC-Inspired Kit For The GR Corolla
-
JDM Fans Rejoice: The R34 Nissan Skyline Is Now Legal In America
Got a hot tip? Send it to us here. Or check out the stories on our homepage.
Maybe someone bought it in Japan while living there and brought it with them when they moved back.
As a USPS retiree, I’ll “go postal” on this Camry- Rural Carriers will literally go to the ends of the earth to acquire a RHD vehicle. There’s a rural Stelantis dealer in Illinois that’s built a national following simply because they specialize in RHD Jeeps and try to keep them in stock, and there’s whole cottage industries involved in importing RHD versions of US market vehicles or doing LHD to RHD conversions.
Also newspaper delivery persons.
I’ve noticed more than one JDM importer advertising their products to rural mail carriers – seem ai little crazy to be relying on a 25+ year old used vehicle, and not a particularly cheap one at that, but, I guess they are 25 year old Japanese cars, and if you maintain them. I mean, a pizza place around me uses a 40 year old Lincoln Town Car as a delivery vehicle, and has had it for about a decade now
Is it Postal Pete/Galena CDJR? They actually have a 1994 RHD Toyota Previa diesel for sale! https://www.postalpete.com/details/used-1994-toyota-van/93515680
Wait, I completely missed this detail: JDM Camrys have the Camry Dent on the side, instead of the rear passenger side corner?
“which looks a bit like a 4/6-scale Toyota Tercel wearing a shed.”
Can we talk about this unreduced fraction? – math teachers everywhere
I also winced at that, but I repressed the urge to response. Thank you.
One car I saw in Munich but didn’t get it was a 1988–1994 Pontiac Sunbird convertible with passive restraint seat belts (the ones with tower stubs attached to the doors). A very elderly German was driving it.
Why would anyone want to spend thousands of euros to ship the piss-poor shitty car to Germany and go through lot of trouble getting a roadworthy certificate and TÜV-approved is beyond me…
Maybe its an emotional choice. Perhaps the car belonged to a beloved grandparent or maybe it was the first new car the family ever brought.
Possibly it is incredibly reliable and the owner ran the numbers and decided it was cheaper to ship the car than buy new or a second hand car that could turn into a money pit.
Without knowing much about JDM cars, wouldn’t a right-hand-drive Camry with English on the dashboard, gear selector and HVAC display make more sense if it came from the UK?
I don’t think we got this generation Camry here (I could be wrong on that, but I certainly don’t think I’ve seen on on the roads) – as far as I’m aware we only got mid-’90s models, then they recently started selling the current model.
Both are actually very rare!
This generation Camry was sold in the UK from 2001 to 2004.
UK would also mean MPH which would be useful if it were imported into the U.S., but don’t think they sold this gen there like Brynjaminjones said. However, Camrys were pretty popular in Australia (and built there too), so that would also be another RHD option.
I believe most cars sold in the UK have speedometers with dual markings, with the primary scale in miles and the secondary scale in km/h,same as USDM.
No. Japanese cars, for the most part, do not use Japanese for the geat selector and instrument cluster. Only sometimes for the HVAC.
You will note that the nav system buttons do have Japanese written on then
Mercedes’ thought made the most sense to me, someone who’s home is here but worked overseas, and brought the car back with them. They already paid for it, parts are dime a dozen, etc. Or a diplomat like Slack00 said.
4-cylinder XLEs still had cloth standard at this point, only V6s got standard leather and only starting in ’05, so this is pretty much directly comparable to a USDM XLE. But, one difference seemingly appears: looks like an adjustable shock absorber setting behind the left side of the steering wheel, which no Camrys here had (just assuming Canada didn’t either). Oh and power folding mirrors but that’s pretty expected for anything JDM.
So this could have been a diplomat’s car. This diplomat would have been posted in Canada, and decided to sell the car locally. I’m a diplomat and we sell boring cars overseas all the time.
You guys don’t get out much…. especially in more rural areas .. here in south Georgia, there’s quite a few right hand drive Toyotas and Hondas and not the performance ones either…why you may ask? POST OFFICE. Way cheaper than right hand drive jeeps or even conversions… I see a few Camry wagons, CR-Vs and some Subaru wagons.
It’s no brainier to buy something cheap like an older JDM sedan or small SUV to do that job…
You guys just get out more, there’s ALOT more to know automotive wise than EVs and new shit no one can afford.
1) It’s fairly ridiculous to assume other people “don’t get out much” simply because they don’t go to rural, southern Georgia.
2) Multiple people mentioned the postal delivery angle several hours before you came in here shouting about it. Did you even read the earlier comments?
Rural, southern Georgia or in fact anywhere in the US outside of a municipality. There are rural mail carriers everywhere if you pay attention or leave central LA occasionally.
I will go further and say that there is no truly rural place anywhere east of the Mississippi.
If you can drive to a major airport in less than three hours, you do not live in a rural place.
Every vehicle mentioned here and every JDM import I’ve seen being used for rural postal duty has been a wagon or SUV of some sort which has decent cargo room in the back. The Camry here doesn’t have that so while I’m very aware that RHD cars are used for this in the US I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that it’s what’s happening here with the Camry.
A low mileage, likely extremely well maintained Camry. Probably the most reliable in its generation. I’d be all over that if I needed a car for $10k.
I mean if it were an AWD wagon I could see a rural mail carrier putting the RHD to work, but a sedan?
This is a bit like the Geo Prizm someone imported in my hometown. It’s so nonsensical. E100 Corollas are still everywhere here in Portugal, and it’s probably the cheapest, least desirable generation of Corollas currently. But somehow, someone decided to spend a buttload of money shipping and legalising it, and is fine paying the aggravated car tax for non-eu imports. Go figure.
Although, to be honest, the day I got stuck behind it in traffic and realised it was a Geo Prizm and not a USDM Corolla like I always thought when I saw it from a distance, I was pretty excited.
The Prizm’s have a better looking front fascia.
Totally worth it for the creases on the hood and the meaner looking headlights.
Plus it’s almost instantly minus a few thousand bucks on the price with a Geo or Chevy badge instead of a Toyota one.
Plot twist – it isn’t JDM, it’s the result of some ridiculous high school auto shop project, a la the RHD Corvette from Corvette Summer
I worked in Toyota’s Georgetown, KY facility around 1993 when they expanded the facility. At the time, they were exporting Camrys all over the world from that facility (that was at least what the staff there was saying).
Before the war, most of the used, boring cars would cross the sea to go to Russia.. Now that sales route is closed and yen has depreciated to boost the economy.. boring cars prices just plummeted (especially if your denomination is USD).
I assume everyone on Autopian checks out the JDM auctions online and know the car’s grade on the report sheets. It is interactive and sometimes more interesting than reality TV shows these days. I always thought it would hilarious for someone to put that on TV at a bar just like bars put sports show on when there is a game.
I would bet the dealer punched in the minimum value in the auction and somehow won it. You don’t back out of deals in Japan. There are still good parts from that car for a very common model. The dealer will live. (vs the Mirai in the middle of no where USA with no H2 stations).
Used cars from Japan continue to be imported into Russia. 213.5 thousand cars were imported last year. This is 32% more than a year earlier. This was due to the strengthening of the ruble against the yen.
Why? I mean, everybody has their kinks, who am I to shame them?
<hurriedly clears BaT history>
Don’t clear the history. Save it.
So you can look at the old ads when you wake up sweating and filled with dread in the middle of the night.
Oh yeah, at least I didn’t buy that.
Instant relief until you remember the problem you did buy sitting in your driveway.
But conversely. This approach can also lead to more sleepless nights,
pining about the ones you didn’t buy when you had the chance.
Life is difficult and confusing.
Dumb JDM choice but great used camry with less then 20k mi fully loaded and cloth thats way better then leather in cold and hot clinates. Drive throughs and left turns at intersections can be tricky since you can’t see around cars. This would be a great amazon delivery vehicle where someone uses their own car. Being RHD you are always on the side you have to get out and deliver which is safer. Plus like someone metioned you are safer in small over lap crashes which cars from this generation didn’t fare to well.
Nothing wrong with drive throughs. You just use your mad backing up skills and stare at the family behind you as you grab your food like a boss.
This is how my postman does his route in a LHD Jeep.
Ok, now I’m picturing someone doing that, but in a tollbooth.
EZ Pass FTW. No tollbooths throughout most of the Northeast. It’s all digital drive-under tolling. Now parking lots, those could be entertaining.
I don’t drive in paid highways enough to use the EZ pass-like system we have here in Portugal – one of the first in the world supposedly – but if I drove a RHD (and I just so happen to have a few saved ads for RHD cars) I’d likely consider getting a ViaVerde identifier, which in our case also works for most parking lots and paid street parking all over the country.
Yeah they dont like when you do that. It pisses them off. Used to go in reverse all the time in HS. Then after they tell you to leave you pull the what my window wont roll down on the drivers side.
RHD has some advantages though – mainly right turns and parallel parking, basically sort of a wash, I guess, once you get used to it. Headlights will be aimed way wrong though, and the radio’s only going to pick up a small percentage of FM stations
Getting gas will be slightly less convenient. But only by a butterflies wing flap of a margin.
The only real concern I have about getting a RHD vehicle in the states would be if it’s a manual.
That’s a lot of years of muscle memory to suddenly try and neglect.
Swapping sides isn’t as hard as you might imagine. I went on holidays from Oz (RHD) to New Caledonia (LHD) a few years ago and didn’t have an issue zipping around in the little manual C1.
Yeah, I zipped about in England in some kind of Manual Ford. It wasn’t near as hard as I thought. Did have slight disorientation after taking a turn into a residential street as to which side of the road, but since moste weren’t much more than one lane wide anyway not much of an issue.
I drove a JDM Fairlady as a daily for about 1990-91. Wasn’t hard. The passenger in the left front seat often felt kind of discombobulated though.
I moved to Colorado a couple years ago and I’m getting close to being ready to start building my overlander.
I’ve basically decided on an N180 4Runner or J80 Land Cruiser, but I also want something unique, which is pretty difficult with any SUV in this area.
So I’m looking at getting a RHD model from an importer, especially because it’s pretty easy to find one with less than 100k miles.
One of the things people often overlook about JDM cars – specifically Tokyo or Osaka cars – is that mileage is NOT automatically a good indicator of engine/transmission/ AC wear. I lived in Tokyo for several years and owned both used and new cars there. My office was 16 K (10 miles) from our apartment. Short distance, right? Not so fast….literally. There was a traffic signal roughly every quarter mile on average for the whole distance. In the morning it could take most of an hour to travel that distance, engine idling and AC running the whole time, transmission shifting through the gears, at every signal. I used to see people reading newspapers draped on the steering wheel, and I remember more than one guy shaving with with an electric razor. A lot of cars have TV’s in their dash displays and yes, it’s legal to watch while you drive. Finally, I had one used car (a Nissan) where I had to have the turn-signal lever unit replaced at 36,000 miles because the contacts were worn out,
So don’t assume that 30,000 miles traveled by a JDM car has the same amount of wear as a US car of identical mileage.
It’s more about the chassis and body. I’m planning on doing a 1UZ or 2JZ swap either way.
This is a good deal. Plus there are Camry enthusiasts out there. Saw a young kid, probably early 20s come out of a late 90s Camry wearing a shirt that read “Toyota Camry SE V6”. I love it when I see enthusiasts of regular ass cars.
My friend mentioned to me that he saw an Accord with a “DMV ACCORDS” car club decal on it the other day. Apparently there’s a group of people in the area that meet up to enjoy their mutual interest in *checks notes* Honda Accords? Weird flex but okay. Car enthusiasm has many shapes and forms and if you love your appliance to death I respect it.
Hell, there’s literally a Ford Tempo fanatic out there, and there’s also a crazy person out there on the Internets who tries to sell other people’s K-cars for them when he thinks they aren’t maintaining them properly
FOLKS
A buddy of mine takes literally every opportunity to mention that he drives a 2006 6spd Accord V6. Double points if he can post a picture (the same one, every time) with it.
Or unicorn versions of otherwise regular cars. Which that Camry qualifies as. Best of all worlds. It’s benefiting from lots of parts availability across the lineup while being an uncommon configuration.
Sometimes the JDM ones come with low mileage and better condition for the price. But the rhd is deal killer for most on a blah vehicle. Instead a strange choice to import. I’ve occasionally seen a boring rhd import around.
That’s a screaming good used car deal.
A Camry with that mileage for under 6 grand.
And hey, the added benefit of being better protected in a moderate overlap front end collision in most cases because you’re sitting on the side less likely to be hit.
It looks pretty inconspicuous until you notice that it’s RHD. Great, cheap car for a postal delivery worker.
My theory was that a previous owner could have been someone in the military. Sometimes, military personnel will temporarily import a vehicle to the country they’re currently stationed at. Maybe someone from Japan spent time in Canada, then decided not to bring the Camry back home?
I don’t know how the Canadian military works, but I do know that’s how at least one Smart Roadster found its way into Virginia. Came over with military and ended up sold.
I think there was a Lancia Thesis that showed up on DC Craigslist a few years ago also, theory was it was either an Italian diplomat who dumped it rather than ship it back, or someone in the US military bought it in Europe and found some way to get it in past ICE (and DOT)
Or a diplomat, more likely.
Why? Because there are some really sick bastards out there.
USM Camrys have the dent on the bumper; JDM Camrys (like this one) have the dent on the side. 😛
Slightly more seriously, and I mean this in the nicest possible way: why do enthusiasts do half the things they do? Just because. 🙂
I like to think it’s b/c for whoever did it, they enjoyed that they, not others, knew what they got, as it were. I respect that.