Battered old pickups tend to survive on the steets longer than their car counterparts, since a smoke-barfing, rod-knocky Joad Family-style truck can still haul a load of stolen copper wire just as well as a cherry Adnan Khashoggi Edition™ Blackwood. Still, the time comes when the duct-tape bills (or, in this case, the parking-ticket fines) can’t be paid, and another California veteran hauler faces the cruel steel jaws of The Crusher. Read More >

There’s the Buick Electra, the Buick Park Avenue, and the Buick Limited. Only during the depths of the Malaise Era, however, could you buy a Buick with all three names. Read More >

According to VWVortex, 1,461 Etienne Aigner Edition 1991 Golf Cabrios were sold in North America. I found one in a Northern California junkyard last year, and now here’s another. You’d think such an exclusive, one-year-only Golf would have legions of collectors driving the values well above scrap price, but the junkyard evidence shows otherwise. Read More >

Going to the wrecking yard on a grim, rainy day somehow makes all the junked custom vans seem even more depressing than usual. How much work went into that mural? Read More >

While the large numbers of Scouts on the extremely urban and snow-free Island That Time Forgot never made sense to me, it’s no surprise that the tough little International Harvester trucks still roam Colorado in large numbers. Still, with so many Scouts, some are going to end up facing The Crusher, and that’s what’s happened to this battered ’70. Read More >

Even though I still think the Achieva was saddled with the very lamest car name of all time— what ether-huffing focus group OK’d that abomination?— the SCX was actually quite quick for its time, and incredibly quick for a marque that appealed primarily to octogenarians too frugal to spring for a Buick. They were fairly rare to begin with, and this is the first SCX I’ve ever spotted in a self-service wrecking yard. Read More >

During my recent trip to California, I stopped by one of the biggest self-service wrecking yards in the San Francisco Bay area, a steel-company-owned yard that turns over its inventory of many hundreds of cars and trucks about every two months. If you see a car in this yard, you can be sure that its steel will be on a China-bound container ship within eight weeks. Such is the case with this 59-year-old Buick sedan. Read More >

The San Francisco Bay Area once had one of the world’s highest Volvo 240 concentrations, but a number of factors are conspiring to send vast numbers of Swedish bricks to The Crusher in recent years. How many? Let’s take a look at the 240 inventory I spotted yesterday at a high-turnover East Bay wrecking yard. Read More >

It was a shame how the Cadillac name had all the blood drained out of it by Malaise Era faux-classy models, and Chrysler wasn’t far behind; by 1982, you could buy what was essentially a Dodge Diplomat with New Yorker badging. A New Yorker with a Slant Six? Read More >

Cadillac’s peak as a build-quality leader and dominant luxury marque probably came earlier than the late 1960s— let’s say 1956— but the perception that GM’s flagship brand was losing ground started sometime soon after the first of the front-wheel-drive Eldorados hit the scene. By the late 1970s, The General was all about faux-metal emblems in cursive script and Beadazzler-applied plastic heraldic crests stuck all over Caddies. Read More >

Before GM delivered a one-two-three punch to Cadillac’s image with the Seville, V8-6-4 engine, and Cimarron, the first of the front-wheel-drive Eldorados attained some sort of zenith for strip-club-owner-grade, ridiculous-yet-awesome Detroit Iron. Here’s a ’68 Eldo that will never drive the Las Vegas Strip again. Read More >

Really cheap, low-optioned Detroit cars haven’t done well for decades, but that didn’t stop Chrysler from following up the super-downscale Omni America with the car advertised as “the lowest priced car on the market available with a standard driver’s-side airbag.” Apparently, no 1991 Plymouth Sundance Americas made it out of the showrooms. Well, none except for this example that managed to dodge The Crusher’s jaws for two full decades before its final tow into a Denver self-service wrecking yard. Read More >

We all remember the Starion, with its TURBO badging on everything from the seat belts to the door handles, but who among us can recall ever having seen the other 80s hot-rod Mitsubishi in the wild? Read More >

We often forget that Ford made the Falcon until 1970. That’s in North America; you could buy a new Falcon— based on the original 1960 version— in Argentina until 1991, and Australians can still buy Falcons today. The shortened-Fairlane-based 1966-70 Falcon tends to get overlooked, unless you live in East Oakland, so it took me a second to figure out what I was looking at when I spotted this one in my local self-serve wrecking yard. Read More >

The agonizing downward spiral of civilization continues; you saw a Mercedes-Benz W126 coupe sacrificed to China’s hunger for scrap steel, and now there’s this even cooler Benz coupe counting the minutes until it, too, gets crushed. At least some of this car’s parts will live on. Read More >