Tassie Devil - the history of our GTRAV34

Recently we received an email from Daniel, who gave us some awesome background info on our GTRAV34 project. We'll let Daniel take it from here:

"Hi MCM,

My name is Daniel and I’ve been watching your build series on the GTRAV34 and, imagine my surprise, when I realised I used to own that very car!

The car was originally sold by Co-Op Toyota in Hobart to a lady and, from memory, her name was Penelope. The original registration was FG0150, and the colour is Galaxy Blue; it looks amazing in the sun.

I purchased the car in 2013 from Jackson Motor Company (JMC) in Launceston as I needed a reliable vehicle to move from Tassie back to NSW, and it truly was love at first sight for me.

It had about 75,000km on it when I bought it, and the first service was done at Carline in Launceston. I still had family living in Tasmania, so I kept the Tassie registration on it until around 2018. My family then moved back to NSW, so I registered it in Katoomba with the plates DMR10P.

In November 2020 I traded the RAV in at Blue Mountains Mazda with around 200,000km for a family member to get a Camry. I then took on a diesel RAV4 from them which, incidentally, was written off in an accident 3 weeks ago.

I was surprised, but really happy, when I saw that you had picked it up from Lithgow and have decided to give it a new life. It was the first car I’d owned that I had the servicing done to schedule because I wanted to keep the book up to date and really look after it. 

It was kind of sad to see the lack of maintenance afterwards. I was even watching the video with Marty saying “change your oil!” and I was yelling back, “I did!”

It is such a great little car; It always started and got me where I needed to go. It got me through some rough times in life, as my family and my little blue RAV were the only real constants.  

It was awesome fun to drive and I enjoyed it so much. My (now) wife and I took it to all sorts of different places as it was a great car to road trip. We took it around Mt Panorama, took the dog to the snow, on beaches: you name it, we went there. It even spent more time with the back seats out, than in it, like a little van. 

It’s a car that I needed to part with at the time, but one that I definitely regret selling. I still have the Tassie plates as a keepsake for what it meant in my life and all the good times and great memories we had with that little car. 

I can’t wait to see how the build evolves and I hope that you have as much fun with it as I did. 

All the best,

Daniel