Someone paid almost £50,000 for this Toyota AE86 Corolla

Time to add the legendary Toyota Corolla GT AE86 to your list of “cars I ought to have bought when they were cheap” alongside, erm, most other cool performance cars from the Eighties and Nineties. 

See this entirely original, one-owner 1987 AE86 with 92,000 miles on the clock just fetched £46,250 at auction. Not bad for a car that was apparently worth so little in 2006, it was almost written-off after somebody keyed it. 

Ok, so you don’t exactly see many of these around anymore. And those you do see have often been modified. To find an entirely original UK-market AE86 that’s had just one owner from new is… well… let’s just say we doubt there are any more out there. 

Supplied by a Toyota dealer in Cambridge, and still wearing its dealer-fit number plates, this AE86 was ordered new by a woman “to cheer herself up after a relationship break-up”. She paid £12,500 for it in 1987, and is only selling after 34 years of ownership because a recent injury has made driving a car without power steering tricky. 

Sold with a complete set of paperwork, including the original brochure, online auction house Car & Classic says this is “the highest UK recorded price for a car of this type sold at auction”. 

What car do you wish you’d bought a few years ago, that you couldn’t afford now?