At $3,400, Is This 1998 Toyota Camry LE An Exciting Deal?

The seller of today’s Nice Price or No Dice Camry boasts that the car is super-rare owing to it being a manual, but warns its engine suffers from an oil leak. They claim to have “priced it accordingly,” but it’ll still be up to us to decide if we’d be better off with a Honda Accord.

It’s been said that it is best to “let sleeping dogs lie.” But what about sleeping cats? Yesterday, we looked at a 1969 Jaguar E-Type FHC that the seller claimed had been sitting fallow—albeit garaged—since 1985. To give you some context of how long ago that was, Microsoft had only just gotten to Windows 1.0 by then. Today, you need both hands and a foot to count the number of updates Windows has seen. As for the Jag? Well, it needs a thorough going through to ensure that all the moving bits move and all the non-moving bits don’t fall off. That doesn’t seem undoable, and at $32,500, the needy but still nice coupe proved an intriguing project. Ultimately, that intrigue resulted in a 63% Nice Price win.

Toyota’s Camry was a thing even before we had Microsoft Windows, mind, or even the Apple Macintosh. Here in the U.S., Toyota debuted its mid-sized family car in sedate sedan and versatile hatch body styles for the 1983 model year. Prior to that, the nameplate had adorned a variation of the home-market Carina model, but that was marketed as part of the company’s sporty car line under the name Celica Camry. That model never made it to our shores.

The singularly named Camry that followed was one of Toyota’s first transverse-engined, front-wheel-drive cars, and aside from some AWD variations, it has kept that format through every ensuing generation to the present day. Proving hugely popular in the States, the Camry’s model line evolved to include coupe and station wagon variants. By the turn of the new millennia, though, those would be either rebranded or dropped, leaving just the sedan to carry on the Camry name.

This 1998 Toyota Camry LE is one of those sedans and features something rare for Toyota’s suburban staple: a five-speed manual transmission. According to the seller, that makes it one of 6,025 out of 427,308 sold that year. The gearbox is mated to the car’s standard 2.2-liter fuel-injected four-cylinder and plies its 133 horsepower and 147 lb-ft of torque to the front wheels.

That drivetrain, along with the rest of the Camry, has a reputation for giving it all it’s got, and in this car’s case, that’s gotten it to an impressive 287,000 miles. And while that might sound like a bit of dull driving even with the manual—this being a Camry, after all—the seller says that the added cold-air intake gives the engine a bit of a growl for, at the very least, some extra auditory adventure.

Yes, that’s somewhat comical, as are the Alcantara steering wheel cover and the boombox stereo that also call this Camry home. Other than the goofy add-ons, the car is in remarkably stock shape. It also presents as amazingly clean, right down to its factory plastic wheel covers and comfortingly familiar gold over beige color scheme.

It’s not all boring perfection, however. Some wear is noticeable on the driver’s seat, and the badging on the boot lid has all gone the way of Elvis. Most egregious, however, is this Camry’s one significant flaw, which is an oil leak that the seller claims originates “from the oil pump area.” Seeing as the oil pump resides inside the crankcase, which is supposedly sealed up by the oil pan, we can postulate that the leak is from somewhere else. The most likely culprit is a front or rear main seal.

The thing of it is, take a gander at that engine bay. Do you notice something about it? Yeah, you can see the road below. The Camry’s engine bay was designed to handle a V6 engine so the four-pot looks comically lost in there. That means that this thing should be a breeze to wrench on, making even a gearbox drop a fairly simple driveway affair. Considering the condition of the rest of the car, does that make the thought of tackling a leaky seal (or pump) a less-than-daunting prospect for your average shade tree tackler?

We can’t pass judgment on that possibility until we consider the rest of the car’s deets and how those all add up against its price. Per the ad, the car has a clean title and wears current tags good through August of this year. The ad’s description also attempts to balance the oil leak that it claims needs topping up “now and then” with the enticement of the add-on stereo, window tint, and that fuzzy steering wheel cover. To the seller, that parity is worth $3,400.

What do you think about this Camry at that cost? Does that seem fair, considering the uber-high miles and the unintentional automatic chassis lubrication system it possesses? Or do those issues dull your ardor for spending even that much on what is arguably an already dull car?

You decide!

San Francisco Bay Area, California, Craigslist, or go here if the ad disappears.

Help me out with NPOND. Hit me up at robemslie@gmail.com and send me a fixed-price tip. Remember to include your commenter handle.