Mother’s Day last weekend got me to thinking about the first car ride I ever took: a cruise home from the hospital in my parents’ 1956 Olds 88. Thing is, that car got destroyed by a combination of Minnesota rust and Minnesota deer a few months later and I don’t remember it. My first identifiable car memory involves crawling around on the slippery blue vinyl back seat (without benefit of baby seat or even seat belts) of my dad’s late-60s company car: a 1967 Ford Custom 500 sedan with three-on-the-floor and overdrive. What’s yours? (Read More…)

You know what’s wrong with this country nowadays? You can’t buy a light pickup truck made by a company so agricultural that a piece of farm equipment is in its very name! That all ended in 1980, when the last pickup rolled off the strike-ridden IHC assembly line. The outdoorsy Scout is still a common sight here in Colorado (on the street as well as in the junkyards), but quite a few of the Scout’s big brothers are still punching the clock as work trucks. Here’s one that made it to the second decade of the 21st century before getting used up. (Read More…)

In 1999, you could still buy a brand-new Peugeot 504 in Argentina. With such a classic French automobile available, Renault’s marketers had to come up with an extra-special advertising gimmick to move those Clios off the lot. How about El Diablo? (Read More…)

Giving gifts to 24 Hours of LeMons judges in order to ensure smooth turning of the gears of justice has been a tradition for several many years now. While jugs of quality booze remain the most common judicial bribe, keeping my liver at least semi-functional mandates that most of that stuff get passed on to track workers. Not so with bribes involving weird toy cars, however; I’ve got quite a collection of such gifts on my office bookshelves now. While I prize my Leyland P76, Nissan Prairie, and Impala Hell Project diorama, the car that now sits in the place of honor on my desk is one that I received from a Denver racer who couldn’t wait for the B.F.E. GP next month and came by Chez Murilee with this lovely Detroito-Tokyo icon of the early 1990s. (Read More…)

The Time Machine Dilemma works like this: your time machine lands on Auto Row in some past decade, and you have enough cash to buy a certain iconic car of that era. Do you buy the iconic car, or do you hoof it to some other dealership, perhaps saving enough money to buy (gold, Microsoft stock, first-edition Philip K Dick hardbacks)? We’ve done this exercise with miserable econoboxes of 1986, a broad spectrum of 1973 machinery, and today the time machine will be hurtling to an even earlier decade. (Read More…)

Remember the rear-window louver craze? Thanks to the large numbers of Daytonas and Lasers that clung to life long enough to enter junkyards in this second decade of the 21st century, we can relive the Louver Era! (Read More…)

When I saw this car at a Denver self-service yard, I had to wonder if Ford really sank so low in the late 1990s as to make this godawful crypto-laundau roof a factory-installed option on the MN12 XR7. I haven’t been able to find any references to such an abomination in any of my reference books, so it’s probably a safe assumption that we’re looking at an aftermarket conversion. (Read More…)

When you need to get your message through to the ignorant hypnotized masses, what do you do? Why, paint that message in small shaky painted type on your Dodge Aspen! (Read More…)

The Land Cruiser is one of those vehicles that washes up in self-service junkyards only after its body and interior become so thrashed that even bottom-feeder truck shoppers can’t stand the idea of being seen in the thing. Contrast this with the legions of great-looking 1980s Jaguars you’ll find in the very same yards. (Read More…)

No, the first-gen Tercel wasn’t related to the Corolla, but the marketing suits at Toyota USA hoped that some of the Corolla’s reputation for reliability would rub off on their smaller, cheaper, front-drive subcompact. It worked, mostly because the Tercel really was as bulletproof as the Corolla. It was also noisier, slower, and less comfortable, but painful memories of the Iranian Revolution-fueled 1979-80 oil crisis made the not-so-thirsty 83-horsepower Tercel very popular in North America. Most entry-level subcompacts don’t survive 31 years on the street, Toyota or not, and so this example I sighted in a Denver self-service junkyard is a rare find. (Read More…)

Sharp-eyed readers noticed the old Valiant parked next to last week’s Eagle Summit Junkyard Find, and some wondered if I’d photographed the Chrysler A-body while I was there. Of course I did! (Read More…)

US Postal Service-surplus right-hand-drive DJ-5s were once cheap and plentiful. Actually, they’re still cheap and plentiful. Some got converted to four-wheel-drive, some got used as farm vehicles, some ended up as urban hoopties… and many of them were bought cheap at auction and then sat for decades, awaiting a project that never got started. Here’s a 40-year-old mail carrier that looks like it went right from the post office to the junkyard. Quite a few rural routes in Wyoming and northern Colorado are handled by non-USPS-employee subcontractors who drive their own vehicles, so it’s possible that this Jeep stayed on the job well into the 21st century. (Read More…)

GM made immense quantities of full-sized Chevrolets in 1969. How many? According to the Standard Catalog, the total production of ’69 Biscaynes, Bel Airs, Impalas, and Caprices was 1,168,300 cars. Well into the early 1980s, these things were as commonplace on American streets as mid-2000s Camrys are today. Given that nobody with the money to restore a ’69 big Chevy is going to waste time on a non-hardtop four-door (what with the large quantities of restorable coupes and convertibles still extant) we can assume that the few remaining sedans will be flushed out by $250/ton scrap-steel prices and crushed during the next few years. (Read More…)

Nearly two months have gone by since the last Name That Car Clock challenge (a Lincoln Town Car timepiece of uncertain vintage), but I’ve got dozens of additional car clocks in my collection of junkyard prizes. Today, we’ve got a tough one— a generic-looking analog flanked by oil-pressure and ammeter gauges in an underdash cluster. Quartz car clocks have been around since at least the early 1970s, and this one doesn’t show any country-of-origin identifiers. Before you make the jump, make your best guess about the year/make/model of the car from which I extracted this chronometer. (Read More…)

The four-wheel-drive Honda Civic “Wagovan” was very popular in Colorado, and you still see them on the street around here. The front-wheel-drive version, however, is quite rare throughout North America. It was a very sensible family hauler, with its high-30s highway fuel economy and big-for-its-size cargo space, but it couldn’t compete with Chrysler’s minivans. Here’s a rare example that I spotted last week in a Denver self-service yard. (Read More…)