Public Enemy’s 1987 ode to the Olds 98, “You’re Gonna Get Yours,” has long been one of my all-time favorite car anthems, and I’ve always pictured Chuck D’s 98 as a mint-green example of the late-70s iteration of Oldsmobile’s top-of-the-line big car. Then I’m at the junkyard and… here’s Chuck’s car! (Read More…)

The pickup-truck version of the Volkswagen Rabbit might seem like a terrible idea nowadays, but these things actually turned out to be pretty useful in the real world. You couldn’t haul 1,500 pounds of hog entrails in one, but you couldn’t do that in a Luv, Courier, or 620 either. (Read More…)

We make fun of the Cordoba today— hell, we made fun of the Cordoba when it was new— but wouldn’t Fiat be wise to slather at least one 2011 Chrysler with “gold”-plated-plastic medallions and get some smooth-voiced macho man to pitch it on TV? (Read More…)

You’d think that the zilch-o-torque characteristics of a Wankel engine wouldn’t be so great for hauling heavy loads, and you’d be right! Adding an automatic transmission to the mix, as is the case with this ’75 Mazda pickup, no doubt made for some interesting driving experiences when hauling, say, a dozen sacks of concrete mix in the back. (Read More…)

You’d think that all the Malaise Era Montes would have been crushed 15 years ago, but you still see the occasional survivor chugging around these days. I spotted this battered-but-solid example in a Denver park a few months back. (Read More…)

Not many folks remember Mazda’s Chevette competitor, the rear-drive Mazda GLC. OK, it was more of a Toyota Starlet competitor, but there’s a certain Chevette-ness about its lines. I spotted this super-rare machine at a Denver self-service wrecking yard yesterday. (Read More…)

The tiny rear-wheel-drive station wagon, killed by hatchbacks, minivans, and 64-ounce sodas, is no longer with us. Here’s a reminder of an era in which such vehicles were relevant. (Read More…)

OK, we’ll admit that the ’75 Fiat 124 Spider was ridiculously underpowered with just 86 horsepower out of its Twin Cam engine, but compare that to the 62.5 horsepower of the ’75 MGB, a car so miserable that its manufacturer couldn’t afford to round the power figure down a half-horse. (Read More…)

Remember window louvers? They were sort of terrible, yet it’s still interesting to see them on a quasi-sporty Malaise Era car. This Celica ST’s louvers will soon be ground up and digested by The Crusher. (Read More…)

Yes, owners of classic cars still drive them on the street during the winter in Denver (though we haven’t seen any real snow yet); I spotted this rare Bavarian at the park yesterday. (Read More…)

I’ve been seeing quite a few junked Datsun pickups in recent years, and most of them have featured the King Cab option. To those of you accustomed to 21st-century pickups with four doors and luxurious back seats, the few additional cubic centimeters of the Datsun 720’s King Cab must seem a cruel joke. (Read More…)

So we now know that GM’s failure to create a decent subcompact during the, oh, forty years in which doing so would have saved the company from certain ruin… well, do we really need to get into that rant right now? (Read More…)

Some might say that the AMC Gremlin, being one of the crudest simplest cars ever built, should be as reliable a tool as the stick used by chimps to extract tasty ants from anthills. It wasn’t quite like that for Substandard Racing and their Gremlin, as we saw at the Laissez Les Crapheaps Roulez 24 Hours of LeMons last weekend. (Read More…)

As a newcomer to Denver, I had my worries that the junkyards here would be wall-to-wall Sables and Sephias. Would my junkyard trips be a slog through a miasma of late-model boredom? As J. Frank Parnell said about the hazards of lobotomies: Not at all! (Read More…)