Junkyard Find: 1988 Plymouth Colt Premier Sedan

Murilee Martin
by Murilee Martin

We see the occasional Colt hatchback in this series— say, this ’84 Plymouth Colt Turbo or this ’88 Dodge Colt hatchback— but the Colt sedan is stop-the-presses rare by Junkyard Find standards. Chrysler called this car the Premier, and it’s full of unusual-for-a-badge-engineered-econobox options.


Of course, we can’t talk about the Colt without watching this Redd Foxx Colt .45 ad, featuring a much earlier version of the car.

Just over 155,000 miles on the clock.

This seat seems to have manual adjustment controls, so what’s the joystick for?

Nine-band equalizers were considered essential to a quality cassette experience in the late 1980s.

Premier!







Murilee Martin
Murilee Martin

Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Hagerty and The Truth About Cars.

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  • Sector 5 Sector 5 on Dec 05, 2013

    Mitsu were a welcome improvement on Renault at the pentagon and beneath most peoples radar. I recall folks like Nissan were offering standard 60 bumper and 80 powertrain which Archie's mopers wouldn't compete with. Warranty wars were on and I think Colt lost to it.

  • -Nate -Nate on Dec 10, 2013

    Whilst walking my favorite local Pick-A-Part Saturday , I spotted a very clean 197? Dodge Colt , 63,000 miles , the near prefect interior and overall lack of dents etc. made it look like an old man's forgotten car . Even the FUGLY original hubcaps were still on it . -Nate

  • 6.2deadlifters get rid of all screens, all touch components and all automatics, then block cell 'data' (not voice) when not in park and watch the accident rates drop like a rock
  • Jpolicke It's so exciting to watch our two largest automakers competing for top honors! Go for it GM, there's still time to catch Ford.
  • Golden2husky It was always about the bean counters. Any part with mechanical connections - accelerator, shifter, parking brake for example, all require a person to connect one end of the control to another part on the car. That connection also has to be designed so that no further adjustment is needed once connected. Hence all those items being electrical now...same guy connecting systems to the harness now just has a few more. While I'm ok with the gas and parking brake, I prefer a traditional shifter. I'm still not thrilled with all the touch stuff in my Honda. Frankly, I choose to take the old Acura unless we need the extra room...
  • Forward Air Controller General Motors recalled 67,380 of its electric vehicles over a software defect that can briefly stop braking while the car is movingso, these software-defined vehicles are just the BOMB, aren't they?Internal testing reproduced the glitch"So we just went ahead and fixed the glitch."
  • Forward Observer Here in the USA we are new at Socialism and might get a little too radical. Is the top of this vehicle resistant to pitchforks and torches?(cf. 'France')
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