I’ve loved high-turnover self-service wrecking yards since I used to hang out at U-Pull Auto Wrecking in Oakland as a teenager in the early 1980s, and so it makes sense that junkyard-related stuff became so central to the Murilee Martin Lifestyle Brand™. During the last year, as my Junkyard Find series has evolved into a near-daily thing, I became increasingly curious about the life-cycle of the vehicles in these yards. A new row of fresh cars appears one day, replacing one that was put out a few months before, and that’s all I knew. Then, earlier this year, I was able to convince the brass at U-Pull-&-Pay Self Serve Used Auto Parts to give me a behind-the-scenes look at their operation, and I chose to follow the trajectories of two cars I thought would be typical junkyard inmates: a 1991 Honda Civic Si and a 1994 Toyota Camry XLE. I visited the auction at which they were purchased, I documented the pre-yard preparations, and I visited both cars every week for their three-month stint as parts donors. After that, I watched them get fed into the cold steel jaws of The Crusher. Here’s how our Civic and Camry spent the final months of their lives. Read More >
Category: Editorials
My peripheral vision is especially tuned in to anything vintage—and especially vintage Pontiacs!
My initial reaction to this sighting was, “Hey, that’s a pretty proper mid/late-sixties Catalina parked over there!” That alone would have qualified it for its fifteen minutes of fame on the Bodacious Beaters page. When inspection revealed the “Ventura” badging on the front quarter panels—well, that put this find on another level, entirely! Read More >
TTAC Commentator kurtamaxxguy writes:
Hello, Sajeev.
I drive an ’09 Subaru Forester XT. The general design is good, but Subaru’s are not particularly economical and the XT requires premium fuel to avoid engine overheating. Read More >
There was a time, when American truck shoppers were willing to tolerate the shame of driving small pickups, when the members of the Detroit Big Three couldn’t/wouldn’t build their own and thus sold rebadged Japanese trucks. GM had the Isuzu-built Chevy LUV, Ford had the Mazda-built Ford Courier, and Chrysler had various flavors of the Mitsubishi Forte aka Mighty Max. In 1982, you could get your Forte as a Mighty Max, a Plymouth Arrow, or a Dodge Ram 50. Though you could buy the Ram 50 until 1986, examples of this truck are very rare these days. Here’s one that I spotted in a Denver yard last week. Read More >
The last five years certainly have not been kind to Institutions throughout the world, especially in these United States. Whether they be people, places, commodities, companies, lifestyles or leisure activities, nothing seems to be immune to the force that is presently driving things along.
The automobile, and the whole infrastructure supporting it is experiencing a paradigm shift that has wrought some serious casualty: Read More >
Okay, so at 257.8 feet, the yacht Delphine is a bit longer than your average Dodge Grand Caravan, Monaco or Polara. It’s even bigger than a Ram 3500 with dualies, but it is a Dodge, in a manner of speaking. Horace Dodge even designed the engine.
Chris writes:
Sajeev,
In a couple recent Piston Slap articles you’ve mentioned that when driving car with a manual transmission its most efficient to accelerate with the engine near its torque peak, then cruise in the highest gear possible. This raised two questions in my mind: Read More >
We often forget about the P-body version of Chrysler’s mainstay-for-15-years K platform, though Shadows and Sundances once roamed North American highways in huge numbers. I still see plenty of completely trashed Ps in self-service wrecking yards— for example, this ’91 Shadow, this ’92 Sundance, and this super-rare Sundance America— but it takes something special to make me willing to do a Junkyard Find on a P. Early-90s factory tape graphics on a crypto-sporty Shadow sold just before the advent of the Neon? Yes, there’s some historical significance here. Read More >
Contrary to popular belief, I am not the wicked wagon hater that much of TTAC’s readership thinks I am. Perhaps I am a curmudgeonly realist when it comes to market forces – but I still like wagons. The fact is, I grew up in wagons, owned a wagon and might be just above the cutoff point where I can remember them dominating the family car segment, rather than crossovers or SUVs.
I’ve decided to put together a list of my favorite, and least favorite wagons of all time for your perusal. Your own comments are welcome as always.
This “barn find” was found at Johnnie’s Sales and Service just the other week, down on Warwick Rd., somewhere in the middle of Massachusetts, where the car has sat for… seems no-one hereabouts can quite remember. Read More >
We’ve seen an ’81 Citation and an ’82 Citation in this series, so let’s continue down GM’s Bad Memory Lane with a 1983 version of the car that damaged The General’s image even more than the Vega. Somehow, this car stayed on the street— or at least out of the wrecking yard— for 29 years, but now it awaits crushing in a Denver self-serve wrecking yard. Read More >
As I always mention every time I write about the Toyota Corona, my very first car was a 50-buck ’69 Corona sedan, and so I always notice them. You don’t see many Coronas these days, though I’ve managed to find this ’70 coupe, this ’70 sedan, and this ’79 sedan in wrecking yards during the last year. All three of those cars were in Northern California, but today’s Junkyard Find awaits The Crusher’s jaws in Colorado. Read More >
HFO-1234yf is a refrigerant that is becoming an industry standard in Europe. Thanks to incentives offered by the Environmental Protection Agency, the refrigerant is likely to be rolled out widely in the United States as well. Honeywell and partner Dupont have a monopoly on the stuff. It also can kill you in more ways than one. Says Reuters:
Read More >
Phil writes:
Sajeev,
I am currently the owner of a 2011 Nissan Frontier that I bought in February of last year. It is both the first truck and new vehicle that I have purchased. I am in the process of buying a house and have a little buyer’s remorse for purchasing a new vehicle. Read More >
Since we were on the subject of electronic and computerized vehicle protection systems, it seemed like a logical move to begin a discussion of another long-standing and not universally beloved vehicle subsystem—this one ostensibly purposed to save us from ourselves, or at least our vehicles from “the nut behind the wheel”. Read More >
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