From pristine Corollas to a Dodge Avenger, Bring A Trailer is known to throw out wild cards every now and then, but none of them have hit in quite the same way as this. See, I’ve done thousands of miles inside a facelifted first-generation Toyota Sienna. Tens of thousands of miles. We had one, and now this one’s on a fancy car auction site and I don’t quite know how I feel.
Don’t get me wrong, this 2003 Toyota Sienna CE deserves to be on Bring A Trailer. Minivans are often used hard until they’re used up, so this 65,000-mile example must be nigh-on top of the market, even with a big old ding on the front passenger door. Could someone potentially have a nicer Sienna cached away in climate-controlled storage? Perhaps, but this is damn close, even if its $12,500 hammer price seems wild.
I suspect living in Colorado and Montana helped preserve its underbody at least somewhat, because despite some corrosion on the exhaust system, the rest of the situation down there looks quite good. You know how it is in the rust belt; the sills go, the arches go, and the rest of the car follows suit. Even the steel spare wheel seems dandy, making for quite the curiosity.
This particular 2003 Toyota Sienna CE is bathed in Denim Blue, an unusual color for a Sienna and yet one that fits perfectly. Want to match the blue instrument cluster dials? This does the trick. Those dials give you an inkling of what the 200-horsepower three-liter quad-cam 1MZ-FE V6 and four-speed automatic transmission are doing under the hood. Oh boy, the interior’s up next. This could get a bit…uncomfortable.
Not by any vice of the Sienna’s design, mind you. Those thrones might not fold into the floor, but that just means they’re supple, clad in a textile that feels like checked velour. A lot of fights happened in the back of these Siennas. Maybe not this one in particular, because the carpet doesn’t look like a Jackson Pollock painting, but still.
Virtually planting myself inside this Sienna brings back odd feelings. I remember the removable seat operation, the weird bank of blank buttons on the lower dashboard, the handles for the pop-out vent windows, the double cream purr of the 1MZ-FE V6, and the view out through that massive windscreen, but most of all, I remember how much of a colossal piece of crap our Sienna was. Sure, the first few years were great, but it was always at the shop after that for unbelievably annoying and repetitive emissions system issues. Well, those and a few knock sensors.
The weird bit about nostalgia is that you can’t pick and choose what sticks with you. The good, the bad, it’s all there just waiting for a familiar cue to blow the dust off. It’s personally peculiar to see this facelifted first-generation Toyota Sienna on Bring A Trailer, but I bet it’ll bring someone a whole lot of joy. At the end of the day, that’s what this hobby is all about. Sure, you might not understand why someone likes a particular facet of it, but so long as nobody’s getting hurt, who cares? Let people have fun, because the memories you carry aren’t necessarily shared with strangers.
(Photo credits: Bring A Trailer)
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