Don't take this the wrong way all of you Celica people, but are these cars really just miserably slow?
I've driven Honda's with more torque.
My roommate drives a 2003 Celica GT automatic and that thing just has no balls really at all leaving a light. Almost feel like it has a hard time just keeping up with traffic until it gets going. It is a lot better once it gets moving, and the RPMS are getting to 3k and above.
If it is really just that slow, then its just whatever, but if it should have a little more pep, then some pointers as to what could be wrong would be great. My roommate swears it used to be faster and all of that jazz. It rolled 100k a month ago. Is the car really just that worn out? It hasn't had all of the maintenance the way it should have, but I've been doing what I could the past several months to get it caught up with everything. A few sea foam treatments, new spark plugs, new fuel filter, new air intake filter, coolant flush, new tranny fluid.
I know my sense of "how it should drive" is biased because I drive a 5spd everyday and a 5spd feels totally different than an automatic, especially when you first start moving. But at the same time, she is telling me about how she used to be able to just punch the gas and it would chirp the tires a little bit. Now, there isn't a whole lot of difference in acceleration between half throttle and full throttle and the tires are pretty worn out, so it should be all but spinning them, or at least I would think.