1987 Daihatsu Charade GTti: Fast Car History Lesson

Remember Daihatsu? The company that built the cars your aunt owned, or the one your older brother drove to uni in the mid-2000s? It was usually a Charade. A pretty standard, very cheap hatchback, and not particularly fast. A couple of staff working for MOTOR even used to own them. But pretty much no one in Australia ever had the chance to own a Daihatsu Charade GTti.

Daihatsu, the company that has spent the last few decades being slowly taken over by its now owner Toyota, built a very impressive thing back in the late 1980s. A proper hot hatch, and one that wasn’t particularly expensive. With a three-cylinder engine coming in at 993cc, with a side of intercooled turbocharging helping it to make 74kW (that’s a nice, round 100hp), the GTti’s engine was lauded as the most powerful 1.0-litre engine at the time.

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Sure, that’s still not a tonne of power, but the GTti only weighed 808kg. This put its power-to-weight clear of other icons (see: cars this author owns or has owned) of the time like the Mk2 Golf GTI or the Mazda NA MX-5. Plenty of videos on YouTube will also give you a hint that it could be quite a handy steer in the right hands. One such clip features a pair of 911s, 993 and 996, taking an embarrassingly long time to catch up to one at the ‘Ring.

Unfortunately, the Charade GTti never made it to Australia, the Charade Turbo being the closest thing to land on our shores. It had pretty much the same engine, albeit missing around 24kW and an overhead camshaft, making it far less of a threat at the Traffic Light GP.

1987 DAIHATSU CHARADE GTti SPECS
Engine: 993cc inline-3, DOHC, 12v, turbo
Power: 74kW @ 6500rpm
Torque: 126Nm @ 3500rpm
0-100km/h: 7.8sec (estimated)
Price: £8199 (when new in UK, not sold in Aus)