By now, this Year Of Our Lord 2016, it may be safe to say that every human being on Earth will have a distinct memory of a Toyota Corolla. Sold across continents, well into its 11th generation, there will be more people with memories of owning, driving, crashing, crashing into, or losing their virginities in a Toyota Corolla than people with memories of the same with a Volkswagen Beetle. Such is the world of progress.

Oh, What A Feeling!

Hard to believe it, but the humble Toyota Corolla celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. Fifty years? You don't say. Who would have predicted that, back in October 1966, when Toyota rolled out the humble KE10 Corolla across Japan at its very own dealership network, the Corolla Store? Spurred by the postwar optimism of the Tokyo Olympics, motivated by industrial might, the long-lived Corolla name—derived from Latin for "crown of flowers"—put Japan on the move, spawning along the way the chassis codes we now know to be humble yet legendary: TE27, AE86, FX16, XRS. Wagon, hatchback, coupe, sedan, rear-drive, front-drive, AWD.

By 1974, the Corolla was the best-selling car in the world. By 2013, Toyota had sold 40 million Corollas. In terms of sales, the Corolla surpasses automotive stalwarts as the aforementioned Beetle—whose sales it surpassed in 1997—as well as the Volkswagen Golf, Ford F-150, and the Mini Cooper. In terms of longevity, the Corolla name joins automotive stalwarts as the Chevy Impala, the Jaguar XJ, and (hell, why not?) the Mitsubishi Galant.

Isn't all of that more interesting than a million "beige" jokes?

When Toyota debuted the current Corolla in 2013, they brought Adam Carolla onstage. Get it? A Datsun racer, he didn't have much to say.

By dint of its survival the Corolla deserves recognition. For every Ford Mustang, there's a hundred thousand Corollas. These hundred thousand Corollas are drenched in monsoons in Thailand, bounced about on dirt roads in Kenya, crashed via dash cam in Russia. It can't be easy to build a car that satisfies needs around the world. Like millions of cheap cars before it, the Corolla was someone's first chance at venturing outside their village, their first chance at mobility. In a Toyota press release, no less than Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda claimed, "My used 4th generation Corolla 1600 GT was like a best friend to me. I shared my youth with it!"

Hey, world domination is never easy. Why do you think Pinky and the Brain never achieved it?

Just 8000 50th Anniversary Corollas will be produced for America, or 0.02% of all Corollas ever built.

At the New York International Auto Show, Toyota chose to commemorate this rarefied milestone with a special 50th Anniversary Special Edition, which comes not in Desert Sand Metallic but in a nice light-ish purple. Redesigned for 2017, the prospective Corolla buyer will get 17-inch alloy wheels, LED headlights, and modest interior upgrades including a full Entune suite. It's a subtle effort, the sort of quiet notice you'd expect from a Corolla. Special Edition and Anniversary badges will be of noteto the second, third, and fourth owners of this Corolla when responding to Craigslist ads, the inevitable fate of all Corollas.

Whether it's a NASA mainframe computer or an Opinel knife, any product that does exactly what it's sold to do, day in and day out, without protest or escalation, eventually gets its time in the spotlight. To do so for half a century deserves even more recognition. The Corolla may be beige, but sometimes the simplest, most unpretentious machines last the longest.

Fifty years of the Corolla: It's like Toyota never left you.

This is the famous one. This is the one that everyone likes.

Images via Toyota, madtype.com, .

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