I was in my old East Bay stomping grounds last weekend, to drive the Scion FR-S (review coming soon) and watch the Oakland A’s beat up the hapless Red Sox. I also spotted one of the greatest motor vehicles in history while driving down High Street on the way to The Island That Rust Forgot. It featured the letters “UFO” across a vaguely tailgate-ish rear body panel. I’ve puzzled out the type of vehicle it’s based on. Can you? (Read More…)

The very first car in my Down On The Street series was a Cadillac Cimarron d’Oro. That was 2007, and I didn’t see another Cimarron d’Oro until last weekend, when I spotted this car in an Oakland self-service wrecking yard. (Read More…)

I’ve been maintaining an unhealthy obsession the Mitsubishi Cordia for a while now, but what about the hatchback Cordia’s sedan sibling, the Tredia? Very, very few Tredias made it into the United States, and I thought I’d never see one in a wrecking yard… but look at what I just found in California! (Read More…)

Everyone knows about the Cressidas of the 1980s, but we often forget that Toyota sold Cressidas in North America through the 1992 model year. That means that the Lexus LS400 and Toyota Cressida were available at the same time for three model years, giving Toyota shoppers the choice of two different rear-drive luxury sedans. I can’t recall ever seeing a ’92 Cressida prior to this one, so here’s a super-rare Junkyard Find from Denver. (Read More…)

There’s no way I’m going to spot a junked 80s Japanese car with the optional super-futuristic digital dash and not go back and buy that instrument cluster. So, now I’ve got a genuine digital dash collection going on, adding the Cressida cluster to my ’84 Nissan 300ZX Turbo cluster and my ’83 Mitsubishi Cordia Turbo cluster. (Read More…)

We’ve seen a totally Malaise-y early Cressida and a didn’t-know-they-built-them-so-recently Cressida in this series, but I’ve been scouring the self-serve yards for an example of the mid-80s rear-drive Toyota luxury sedans. Finally, here’s an ’84, complete with all manner of high-tech (for the time) features. (Read More…)

Chrysler sold P-body compacts in near-identical Dodge and Plymouth flavors; we saw the ’91 Dodge Shadow yesterday, and the very same self-service yard has this ’92 Sundance. (Read More…)

The Chrysler K platform was getting pretty dated by the early 1990s, though the 2.2/2.5 engine family was still technologically relevant (when compared to such Industrial Revolution-era machinery as GM’s Iron Duke). Chrysler put together yet another version of the K platform to create the P-body, which it then used as the basis for a family of compact cars intended to replace the even-more-dated Omnirizon cars. Thus was the Dodge Shadow born. Chrysler sold quite a few Shadows, which means you still see them on the road every now and then. I’ve been seeing Shadows and Sundances in large quantities in junkyards for the last 15 or so years, and only recently has the flow of P-bodies to The Crusher slowed down. Before they’re all gone, here’s a bronze Shadow I spotted at a Denver self-serve yard. (Read More…)

When we speak of hoopties, we generally mean the four-wheeled variety. However, persuading a nowhere-near-complete Malaise Era Project Hell Bike to transport you to a race track 350 miles distant should, in my opinion, stretch the definition to include two-wheelers as well. My cousin Sam, aka Judge Sam of the 24 Hours of LeMons Supreme Court, decided that he needed to hit the fast-forward button on his ’74 Shovelhead project in order to get from his home in Minnesota to the Chubba Cheddar Enduro in proper fashion. The bike wasn’t quite ready and the journey was an extremely arduous one, but it was worth it. (Read More…)

In the final year of the Malaise Era, truck shoppers could still get a Chrysler SUV that wasn’t trying to be a tall New Yorker. Because the echoes of the vans-and-Quaaludes ethos of the 1970s were still quite loud in 1983, this Ramcharger came equipped with groovy earth-tone stripes. (Read More…)

The non-convertible Mk1 VW Golf was sold in the United States through the 1984 model year and the Cabriolet version well into the 1990s, which means that most of the examples you see in high-turnover wrecking yards nowadays are the soft-top variety. I have a friend who is trying to get a long-idle GTI project into streetworthy condition, and so I’ve been keeping my eyes open for a 3-door hatch Mk1 Rabbit with black interior for him. After six months of spotting Cabrios and the occasional hooptied-out 5-door, I found this ’79 in a Denver self-serve yard. (Read More…)

I still haven’t gotten around to building my 1/25 scale Billy Carter Redneck Power Pickup kit, but that won’t stop me from adding more projects to my “get to it someday” collection… which I’m about to do, now that TTAC reader Neb has pulled my coat about the huge lineup of 1960s and 1970s plastic model kits being made from the original tooling by Round2 Models. (Read More…)

Since I’m now shopping for some sort of postwar American sedan for a foolish road-racer project and the ’51 Nash Airflyte in the Brain-Melting Colorado Yard isn’t for sale, I decided to pay more attention to the large selection of Kaiser-Frazer products parked nearby. How about a car with an optional factory color so impressive that the manufacturer installed badges with that color’s name on the fenders? (Read More…)

Writing this series has made me start paying more attention to types of vehicles I’ve long overlooked. Say, the early Nissan 300ZX, or the Mazda-based Mercury Capri. Then we’ve got the beat-up work trucks that still roam the streets in large numbers but are finally dying out, e.g. the Dodge D-100 and the late-60s GM C-series. Today, it’s the turn of Ford’s workhorse from the darkest days of the Malaise Era. (Read More…)

Even after Chrysler debuted the company-saving K Platform in 1981, the older Simca-derived Omnirizon continued to be built in large quantities. Sightings of te Dodge Omni, Plymouth Horizon, and their many siblings and cousins are very rare today, but I still run across the occasional example in the wrecking yards. We saw this ’78 Horizon not long ago, plus this ’84 Turismo, and today we’ll take a look at an even later Omnirizon. (Read More…)