 2002 Toyota Celica GT-S
 GOOD STUFFSporty Great handling Quick little momma Fuel efficient four with overdrive 5th and 6th gears Looks may appeal to some High-quality construction  BAD STUFFFront-wheel drive means torque steer Cramped interior Instruments disappear with sunglasses Speedometer is ludicrous Doesn't feel or sound powerful Only two doors It's not cheap; value is missing
 First, the bottom line
I haven't seen a wing like this since Buddy Baker and Richard Petty set records behind the wheel of 1970 Dodge Daytonas and Plymouth Superbirds.
And there's no NOT looking it. Every time you glance into your rear view mirror, you'll be startled to discover a wing riding your rear. Momentary alarm. Little flinch before you safely change lanes. The wing and an air dam five and one-half inches off the pavement help define the 2002 Toyota Celica GT-S as a Boy Racer car, a suburban scooter for those who value performance and handling above all else. Because .. When "all else" is taken into consideration, the Celica GT-S comes up short. At its price, for its targeted buyer, it is not the fastest, not the most comfortable, not the safest, not the most ergonomic, not the best engineered. In both practical considerations and acceleration it is outdone by Subaru's all-wheel drive WRX. It is bested in most considerations by VW's GTi. It is not, in my opinion, as good a Celica as the 1990 All-Trac model. The redline on the Celica GT-S is pegged at 7,800 rpm. 7,800 rpm! Rev any American car to that and you'll leave parts for a quarter-mile. Only NASCAR engines can hit 7,800 rpm (and more). But consider just the sound of 7,800 rpm. In first gear, revving to redline will take you to 39 mph. Second gear peaks at 61 mph. Just try that around town. Try that in any residential neightborhood. Do it and the phones will come alive with complaints of some "racing idiot" endangering pets and small children. Lower-revving cars just don't sound as threatening. Same speed, less threatening. So where can you make use of the high-revving engine? Not the interstate, for sure. Sixth gear is a monster overdrive, to help yield that 32 mile-per-gallon fuel efficiency figure for highway usage. You'd have to shift down about three gears to pass with power. In practical terms, your power range is not very useful. It is typical of any four-cylinder engine. The two-door design also has all the limitations of a coupe, and some that shouldn't be necessary. Entry to the rear is typically coupe-difficult, and once back there there is no headroom at all. You have to slump. You can't wear a cap of any kind. And that's a problem because you'll bake in direct sunlight through the large rear window. Even the driver has insufficient headroom. No caps allowed. The driver's seat back must be dropped rearward at quite a slant to prevent a driver's head from scraping the roofliner with each head-turn. When the front seats are tilted forward to allow someone to enter the rear seat, those front seats do not return to their preset positions. You'll have to readjust each time you carry rear passengers. That shouldn't be necessary -- and most manufacturers have figured out how to return seats to presets. This appeared to be a typically high-quality Toyota product, however. Tightly constructed to close tolerances. And it's quick in all-out, to-the-redline runs. Yes, it is. But competitors like the Subaru WRX don't come with the Celica's design problems. And if you want to understand engineering and ergonomic excellence in a small car, read the review of the VW GTi. These are performer/handlers of the first rank, as well. I predict limited sales of the Celica GT-S, not because of what it is, but because of what it isn't.
 Safety
The Toyota Celica has not been tested recently -- in any model guise -- by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. But the less severe tests of the National Institute for Highway Safety have been done, and the Celica earned a four-star rating for the frontal crash into a barrier and only three stars for a side impact crash. Its scores are surpassed by the best-in-class Honda Civic coupe and the Volkswagen products. Two important safety features were options on this racy GT-S model. Anti-lock brakes were $300 and side air bags were $250. Both should be standard on a performance car like this pretender.. For comparison, consider that the VW GTi comes standard with anti-lock brakes, side air bags and side air curtains to protect heads. It's much the same with the Subaru WRX, where anti-lock brakes and side air bags in the front seats are standard equipment.  Handling/Performance
Most often, performance considerations can be reduced to numbers. Zero to 60. Quarter-mile time and speed. Top speed. And certainly these numbers are important and provide pure performance comparisons. But numbers don't take into account the feel -- the rush experience -- of acceleration. Throw away the numbers for a moment and focus on these images of horsepower and torque curves -- horsepower on top, torque below. In the white tracings can be read a story..
The next set of curves looks a bit more exciting. And it is. But this combination is actually a tick slower in performance numbers compared to the Celica GT-S. This is the power band of the 1990 Toyota Celica All-Trac. It had a turbocharged engine and all-wheel drive. In the first 500 feet of acceleration, it blows the GT-S away. In the real-world, it's more thrilling and the combination is better in poor weather. The final set of curves represents a competitor, the Subaru WRX. Just look at the snap that comes into play between 2,500 and 3,000 rpm! This is what auto testers mean when they talk about a "punch in chest" during acceleration. All is normal at first, then -- WHAM -- the power slams you back, like igniting an afterburner in a jet. Thank a turbocharger for this. And be thankful it has all-wheel drive.
In the color graph to the left here, we have yet another way to view the thrill, the rush. The red tracings show g-force -- the force of gravity on a body -- under full-bore acceleration. The first graph here is of the Toyota GT-S, which achieves a maximum 0.55g in first gear. Very average. No kick.
So study the numbers that follow and keep in mind that they tell only part of the story. Pop the clutch on this GT-S and redline each gear and it's fast. Zero to 60 in 6.5 is fast. As shown in the video, the all-black GT-S with the tall wing is bad to the bone. It corners at seemingly any speed and stopped well with the optional anti-lock brakes. The transmission takes some getting used to. Reverse is too easily engaged (and beeps inside the car). Shifts are easily missed and a driver may engage reverse when meaning to engage first. Oops. More than that. Dangerous. Even at the end of test week, I was still hitting reverse by accident. Very dangerous. But, for me, the low air dam that scraped every inclined driveway and the Super Boy Racer rear wing branded this as "not an adult's car". Not my kind of car. Note: You can create horsepower and torque curves and much more using the Cartest program linked from Sideroads here at The Car Place. Using that program, I pitted the GT-S in a drag race against some competitors, current and old. It came in fourth, losing to the Subaru WRX, Eagle Talon TSi and Mitsubishi Eclipse GSX. It barely edged out the old Celica All-Trac. The figures below are from computer testing the 2002 Toyota Celica GT-S.
 Comfort
If appearance tilts this coupe's appeal toward the very young, comfort considerations doom it for anyone much older than legal drinking age. Not only is it "no fun" from a comfort standpoint, it's punishment. And it's unnecesssary. Begin with the task of entering the car. The exterior door handles are of the inferior nail breaker variety, but you can excuse that, right? Open the door wide and be sure it secures in place. The roofline is low, so duck as you enter. Seats are low and deep, and our tester had optional $660 leather-covered front seats. Entering the rear seat area is a different story. A front seat must be slid forward and the seat back tilted forward. The step-through space is small and entry is best done by the athletic. There are two seating positions in the rear and they are deep, deep buckets that force knees to chin. Even in those buckets, an average size person's head will strike the roof. The head must be tilted forward. And anyone in the rear will baste under the vast expanse of rear window glass. So cramped is this rear arrangement that NHTSA was unable to test crashworthiness for rear seat passengers -- because there wasn't room back there to place an adult-sized crash dummy! That pretty much says it all. This is a near-useless rear seat.
Note: View a scrolling panorama of the dash in this new window. The instruments feature the most ludicrous speedometer I've encountered in any car. First off, the instruments become invisible if sunglasses are worn, but that pales in comparison to the speedometer's problem. On it, numerals are arranged clockwise from the 6 o'clock bottom around to 3 o'clock. Zero is at the bottom; 160 is at 3 o'clock. The only way this car will ever see 160 miles an hour is in the transport bay of a trans-Pacific jet. But consider what it means in practical terms. Put the Celica GT-S in motion and the speedometer doesn't even register that fact. The needle doesn't seem to move at first. If the speed limit is 5 or 15 mph, you will have great difficulty seeing any change on this ridiculous instrument. In fact, every legal speed is found in the first quarter of the speedometer's number set. My disdain for this can't be overstated. Drivers need the legal interstate speed to be straight up, at the top of the speedometer (and the OFF position should always be straight down). There needs to be strong separation of speed indicators at low speeds. No one ever needs a "160" numeral and it just encourages some idiot to try to touch it. If governing a vehicle's top speed seems somehow anti-American to you, then perhaps governing a speedometer's readout would make sense. Take away the measure and some of the appeal of speeding is gone. (Small aside: A group of nitwit motorcyclists were busted where I live this week, doing wheelies at 90 mph. No big deal, one guy said on camera, adding "I hit 167 mph coming down here." Yeah, well, I'd just as soon he had no idea how big a fool he was.) Speedometer aside, the rest of this interior is little better. Sitting upright, as NASCAR drivers do, is not possible because of the low roof line. The seat back must be angled backwards. While the front buckets are supportive for spirited driving, they proved uncomfortable for long-distance travels. And anyone with a mobility problem will not like this car.
In the footwell, a driver has three metal pedals with rubber insets. They were not slippery in use, and the brake pedal is close enough to the accelerator to be used in a heel-and-toe fashion. There is too little torque here for any kind of modest launch -- and you'll likely stall the engine a few times before you become familiar with the needed rpm. Either that, or you'll jerk your passenger's head into the back seat by overcompensating. The fuel filler is located a foot behind the driver's door, very convenient at service stations. There are nice styling touches on this car, apart from the air dam and wing. Along each rocker panel, for instance, you'll find ridges that sweep upward, a racy touch that looks good. The front is pedestrian-friendly in its slope and the headlights have upswept ridges that help a driver determine where the front of the car is located. But visibility overall is severely compromised. It is particularly poor to the rear, and makes backing up an adventure. Instead of being on the door armrests, the power window switches are on the center console. While this prevents rain water from pouring onto them when a window is cracked open, it is less convenient to use with the hand doing the most driving/shifting work. They are not one-touch up and down, as is now standard on VWs. Air flow from the round vents Toyota uses was hard to control. Passengers turned it toward me. I turned it back toward them. War! You've been there. Surely this can be fixed with better design. Another design problem, to my thinking, is the hood prop. Toyota didn't spring for the preferred hydraulic struts and went for a chintzy prop rod instead. But it's quite cleverly hidden. Not in front where we usually expect to find one. Not along the right side, a second favorite location. No. This one is in the left channel. And it inserts into a hole at the rear of the raised hood. Now this is not good, for several reasons. Shorter people will have difficulty engaging this prop rod. Everything is too far away. And leaning over will dirty clothes pressed against the front of the car. Even average-sized folks will have to slide that rod around to find the hole. Anyone with vision problems has more of a problem at a distance like this. Plus, this favors left-handers, a minority including two in my family -- but a minority nonetheless when majority rule must be the design criteria. Like most righties, my left-handed prowess is minimal. I had to lean over and use my right hand to prop this weighty thing up. But what happens if the rod isn't secured in place? A slip means the hood crashes down -- perhaps onto fingers or heads. Rear prop rods are a lousy idea and a $25,000 car like this should come with hydraulic struts that do the lifting and holding for us.  Parting Shots
Not much left to say except that considered by itself, the Toyota Celica GT-S looks attractive.
Sounds good. But consider each "buy" factor individually, against what competition offers, and the GT-S comes up short. I can't justify the near $26,000 sticker price of the tester. Whatever Toyota had in mind when this was created, time and evolution passed them by. Better Boy Racer cars are available today. 'Nuff said.
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Specifications
I mean, just look at that thing. It's a towel rack!
VIDEO: Get ready to hang on as we tool this bad boy around residential streets. This video can be seen using 
The top set of two tracings is a very average looking set of curves. Power rises steadily with rpm, reaching a peak near redline. This image represents the horsepower and torque in the 2002 Toyota Celica GT-S. Horsepower can be seen as a steady rise (the small torque comes on early). The engine here is small; there is no snap, no rush at all, present in this curve. At lower rpm, minimal horsepower is available (about 50 hp @ 2,000 rpm).
The graphs provide the objectivity that reinforces the subjectivity of writers who fall in love with certain cars, who brand them thrilling, even when their performance is no better or only marginally better than competitors. I well remember the stunning rush of the Mazda RX-7 Turbo, the Eagle Talon TSi, the old Mitsubishi Eclipse GSX with all-wheel drive and a turbocharged engine. The steeper the curve rises at once, the greater the feel and thrill of rocketing away. These cars are a hoot to drive. Not always faster. But always more fun.
Now study the graph to the right of g force felt under full acceleration in first gear. It's 0.95g, one of the highest figures you'll see, higher than a Corvette or Viper or the Mazda RX-7 Turbo. It's the chart of the Subaru WRX. And, yes, you really do feel that hold-on-tight rush when you're slammed back into the seat!
Ergonomic considerations are not all that great for front seat occupants. There's a three-spoke steering wheel, meaning a hand can't be rested at the 6 o'clock position. The cigarette lighter is down and right, blocked for easy access by the gear shifter. No right armrest and two cupholders that don't expand or contract and wouldn't hold anything I brought along. The moonroof, fully closed, had air hisses if the cover was slid back.
Bold styling. Great handling. Decent performance. Quality build construction. A maker with a reputation for building reliable, durable vehicles.
Home, James