imported hiluxes

[wombat]

G'day everyone

I've been practically living on this forum since I got my SFA about a month ago. It's been a long time in the making and has finally happened. Just a pity that I'm in Melbourne and she is in Cape Town and I won't get to see her for another 3 months...

Anyway, in the meantime I've been wondering about the so-called imported Hiluxes - mine is imported and quite a few people on the forum seem to have them as well. Apart from the axles and shape of the load bin and tail lights, are there any other differences between the imported SFAs and the locally manufactured ones? Also, does anybody know the history of these bakkies? Any idea where they were built and how so many of them got into the country? Presumably Toyota didn't import them because that would have meant that they were competing with their local manufacturing?

I've been trying to join the dots - particularly since mine is a '94 model and has the same body shape (apart from the bin, of course) as the local SFAs and the only place that this shape of Hilux was still being made in 1994 was in SA. Australia and everywhere else I know of moved to the slightly rounder body shape in 1989, but we never got that series in SA. So I'm guessing that the 'imported' Hiluxes might have been built in SA for other markets (like Botswana?), exported, and then over the years made their way home.

Does anybody know the story?

[Family_Dog]

Hi Wombat,

G'Day to you Mate, and welcome to the forum!

Good question, and I look forward to the answers. Suffice to say, the imported models look "nicer" from the rear :-)


-F_D

[BenHur]

This is based on hearsay but this is how I understood it:

Prior to 1992/93 somewhere :? :? (someone else here might know the exact year Toy SA did not manufacture D/C 4x4s locally and all the ones Toy SA sold were imported from down under (I think) but Botswana has also got a finger in the pie somewhere as I know they sometimes call them the Botswana spec as well.

Then when they dropped this model for the later shape outside SA, Toy SA started making them locally, but changed the engine from the 4Y to the 22R (2.4 v.s. the old 2.2) opted to change the rear axle to the Gearmax one (due to some or other law about the percentage of local parts that has to be used in locally produced vehicles) and also changed the loadbin to look similar to the local ones, with the lights below the tailgate.

Some of the other guys here might be able to shed more light on this as this happend at the stage in my life when I was still only interested in my GTi, girls and jolling so I did not pay too much attention to Hiluxes back then.