A Japanese company known for customised versions of classic Toyota SUVs and vans has turned its attention to a Corolla-sized station wagon, with awesome results. In beige if you want it (who wouldn't?).
"Renoca by Flex" (presumably Flex is the parent company, Recona the car brand) can now take a Toyota ProBox and turn it into the Euro Box, a reasonable facsimilie of something small and dreadful from the 1980s. Automatically incredibly cool to our 2021 eyes, in other words.
If you haven't heard of it, the Probox is an utterly ubiquitous Corolla-sized wagon (built by Toyota subsidiary Daihatsu) that's been around since 2002. It's incredibly common on the streets of any Japanese city and comes in both wagon and van configurations. It's vaguely related to the Feilder wagon (which is common on Kiwi roads) and is also sold in Japan as the Mazda Familia wagon.
Recona can take a Probox and offer customers a light facelift at the front, including back-to-basics circular headlights and plain black grille, retro-style steel wheels (choice of two styles) and an exterior refinish in any one of seven flat tones, including an especially drab beige. Although red and blue are also on the colour chart (but why would you?).
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Inside there's a choice of four upholsteries, leaning heavily towards the coarse and/or tweed. Our favourite is the black, white and brown check.
Prices vary depending on the age and mileage of the donor vehicle.
But a typical figure quoted on the website for a Euro Box we configured ourselves (beige, "dog dish" sttels wheels and the check trim) is NZ$27,000.
Which is actually quite a lot of money for an elderly Toyota light commercial. But what price a classic, right?