Down On The Junkyard

If you were cruising American roads during the late 1960s through middle 1980s, you saw them everywhere: Bell System vans in their unmistakable white/green livery. Those trucks are nearly extinct today, so I was pleased to find this ex-phone-company Vandura at a self-service car graveyard near the Tesla Factory in Northern California.

For the past few months, this series has been heavy on imports and products from GM and Chrysler, so I decided that it was time to honor a discarded Ford vehicle here. Here's one of the most influential Dearborn machines ever built: a first-generation Explorer, found in Colorado a while back.

When I write about interesting cars I run across while making my junkyard rounds, I try to choose lead photos that give the subjects a bit of dignity in their final days. This isn't possible with an IQ, so I've chosen a photo that emphasizes how tiny it is next to a fourth-gen Honda Odyssey.

Air-cooled Beetles! Nearly 50 years after the last ones were sold in the United States and 23 years since the final Vocho rolled off the Puebla line, they still show up in American self-service car graveyards. Here's a '72 Super ragtop in Aurora, Colorado.

By the late 1980s, it was clear that the decades-long era of boxy, rear-wheel-drive Detroit full-size sedans was coming to a close. For The General's Chevrolet Division, the facelifted 1986-1990 version of the venerable third-generation Caprice was the last of its type, and I've found one of these cars in a Denver-area junkyard.

The Toyota Camry has been the best-selling sedan in America for nearly three straight decades, so commonplace that it's hard to remember a time when they weren't everywhere. The first examples of the Camry reached our shores in the spring of 1983, and I just found one of those cars in a Denver-area car graveyard.

For the 1987 through 1992 model years, car shoppers could order an ASC-modified Firebird with a convertible top through Pontiac dealerships. Prior to that, a bunch of entrepreneurial outfits with varying degrees of sketchiness had convertible-ized the third-generation F-Body. Here's one of those cars, found in a car graveyard in Aurora, Colorado.

Last month, we admired a German luxury car that had depreciated from $208,062 to scrap value in 20 years. Parked just one row away from that Audi was a German luxury SUV that stayed on the street for just 15 years before depreciating from $90,134 to scrap value (those are 2025 dollars). Let's take a look.

For those private contractors who work doing rural mail delivery for Uncle Sam, right-hand-drive is a must-have. Stellantis still sells new RHD Wranglers here for that purpose, but what if you don't want to shell out north of 50 grand? What then?

While the Datsun 280ZX still shows up with reasonably frequency in the big self-service car graveyards I frequent, discarded examples of its Toyota Celica Supra rival are much harder to find. Here's one that showed up at a Colorado Springs facility last summer.

One of the few Detroit car divisions that used six-digit odometers in at least some of its vehicles during the 1980s and early 1990s was Oldsmobile. That means it was possible for me to document an Olds that drove past the magical 300k mark, when I spotted this Cutlass Ciera in a Denver-area car graveyard recently.

Before the creation of the Geo brand for the 1989 model year, The General sold Isuzus and Suzukis with Chevrolet badging in the United States. Only one of those vehicles started its American showroom career as a Chevrolet and finished it as a Geo: the Spectrum. Here's one currently residing at a car graveyard in Colorado Springs.

Used-up American trucks of the 1940s and 1950s show up in U-Pull car graveyards on a regular basis, which can be surprising to Internet Car Experts who believe all such Rare Classics™ are worth big money. Here's the latest: a 1954 Dodge found in the shadow of Pikes Peak recently.

Detroit sedans with manual transmissions become uncommon as automatics got cheaper during the 1960s, and they were nearly nonexistent by the time the 1980s came to an end. Still, they were available, and I've found this five-speed equipped Lancer in an Aurora, Colorado car graveyard.

Buyers of Detroit full-size vans became increasingly unwilling to take manual transmissions as the 1960s became the 1970s, but new three-pedal big vans were available long after that. I found this ultra-rare manual-equipped E-150 in Colorado Springs last week.

Every time I find a 1980-1985 GM X-Body car in a junkyard, I think something like this will be the last one I see for a decade, because there can't be any more of these heaps left. But then another shows up, and another, and another. The latest is this Phoenix in a Denver-area boneyard.

Sajeev Mehta no longer works here, but we still love him and that means I enjoy making his bitter tears flow with stories about discarded classic Ford Motor Company products. Here's one that currently resides at a boneyard in Denver, Colorado.

This series has been light on 1960s vehicles in recent months, in large part due to the irresistible appeal of writing stories about cars from the Great Recession/ bankruptcy era. In fact, the last 1960s Junkyard Find article went up way back in March. So, it's time to admire an affordable Kenosha product made in the year of my birth, found in a wintry car graveyard in northeastern Colorado last week.

On April 1, 2010, the final vehicle built at the New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. plant rolled off the production line. That vehicle was a red Corolla, and I spent years searching junkyards for a discarded Corolla built during the final few months of the storied GM-Toyota joint venture in Fremont, California. Finally, success!

The highest-mile junkyard vehicle I've ever written about was a Georgetown-built 1996 Toyota Avalon with 949,863 miles on the odometer. I say that's an American car, but what if your definition requires that a vehicle's manufacturer be based in the United States? In that case, today's Junkyard Find is the new Murilee Martin Born In The USA Junkyard Odometer champion.

The era of widespread usage of solid-state electronic odometer displays began in the mid-to-late 1990s, which means I don't write about many discarded high-mile vehicles from our current century. Today, we've got a welcome exception: this Kia now residing in a Denver-era car graveyard with close to a half-million miles on the clock.

Even though I live in Saab-friendly Colorado and I still see plenty of Trollhättan machinery in the local yards, it has been more than three years since we last admired a discarded vehicle from the Svenska Aeroplan Aktiebolaget in this series ( a 99 two-door). Here's a base 900 two-door hatchback (or three-door hatchback, if you prefer), found in a Denver-area yard.

The Mercedes-Benz W126 coupe was one of the cocainiest vehicles ever sold. and yet a Colorado-based owner of one of these machines felt compelled to rebadge their car as a Carlsson-modified V12-equipped W140. That car ended up in the Denver Pick Your Part last year, and I was there to document its fall from white-powder-dusted grace.

After Chrysler looked to its European operations to develop the Dodge Omni/Plymouth Horizon subcompact, a bunch of Omnirizon-derived machines were spun off the original Rabbit-ish hatchback's design. I have made a long-term effort to document examples of each one in junkyards, and today we have a genuine Dodge 024 in a boneyard south of Denver.

When I spot a Malaise Era product of the Ford Motor Company while making my junkyard rounds, I like to text photos of them to our friend Sajeev Mehta and get his bitter tears a-flowing. My favorite Denver-area yard now boasts two such cars from the year of America's Bicentennial: a Mercury Marquis and this Ford LTD, both 4-door pillared hardtops.

While Daihatsu has long been one of the biggest sellers of small cars and trucks in its homeland, the brand was available in the United States for just the 1988 through 1992 model years. Two models were sold here: the Rocky mini-SUV and the Charade supermini. Today's Junkyard Find is one of the very last Daihatsus sold in the United States, discovered at a Denver boneyard earlier this year.

I have enjoyed photographing Chevrolets with branded cameras included with the purchase of a new Chevrolet or issued as a promotion by a Chevrolet dealership, and I'm going to continue that tradition with today's Junkyard Find.

If you're going to go to the trouble and expense of importing an overseas-market car to the United States, would you choose a car that was sold here in nearly identical form? That's what someone did with this GDM Paseo, which I found in a Denver-area boneyard recently.

There's no depreciation like European luxury car depreciation, and the junkyard is the best place to see that phenomenon on vivid display. Today's Junkyard Find now resides at Colorado Auto & Parts, just south of Denver, and it has plenty of fascinating stories to tell.

Saddam Hussein's forces invaded Kuwait in August of 1990 and seemed set to push on into Saudi Arabia as well, and it sure looked like we were going to see a repeat of the fuel shortages of 1973 and 1979. As a result, I dumped my idea of building a 454 for my 1965 Impala sedan and settled for a 350.

I've documented 3,142 junkyard vehicles, more or less, since I started doing this job in 2007. Out of all of those, only four have been Infinitis. I decided that I would shoot the next discarded first-generation Q45 I found; that car turned out to be this '92 in Richmond, California.

Colorado junkyards are good places to find interesting Subarus, as I've learned after 15 years of living in the Centennial State. The Jeep XJ Cherokee was as popular as any Subaru model here, so those same yards also serve as comprehensive XJ museums. Here's one of the very last XJs built in the United States, and its steering wheel is on the right side.

The International Race of Champions was run from 1974 through 2006, with drivers in identically prepared cars. From 1975 through 1989, those cars were Chevrolet Camaros, with the Dodge Daytona taking over for the 1990-1993 period. The street IROC Daytona never sold as well as its IROC Camaro predecessor, but I've found this final-year example in a Denver self-service car graveyard.

Last week, we saw a 1990s Japanese car that was sold for just a single model year in the United States, and now we're going to follow it up with another. Meet an incredibly rare US-market Nissan Axxess, now residing in a self-service car graveyard between Denver and Cheyenne.

I live in Colorado, which means that my local junkyards offer a comprehensive history of just about every Subaru model sold since the dawn of the 1980s (and sometimes before then). One had evaded me for many years, though: the one-year-only Legacy SUS. Now I've found a genuine SUS within sight of Pikes Peak.

Junkyard RVs can be scary to shoot for this series, because they can contain all the gross and biohazardous stuff you find in discarded vehicles and they're essentially abandoned houses with all the nastiness you find in those. But a genuine, numbers-matching Toyota Chinook RV conversion is a junkyard rarity, so I took the chance and climbed aboard.

The final Suzuki cars sold in the United States and Canada were 2013 Kizashis, SX4s and Grand Vitaras (sadly, the Equator got the axe a year earlier). That meant that we never had the opportunity to buy the SX4 S-Cross, which debuted as a 2014 model. But wait! The S-Cross was available in Mexico, and now one of these fine machines resides in a Colorado car graveyard.

Last year, we admired a 1993 Nissan Sentra in the New Orleans Pull-A-Part with a final odometer reading of 320,165 miles. That car was well-traveled by cheap-econobox standards, but now I've found this slightly newer Sentra with far more miles in Colorado Springs.

European Fords! I find them regularly during my junkyard travels, documenting everything from a 1956 Ford Zephyr to a 2005 Ford StreetKa in recent years. Merkurs have become rare junkyard sightings during the past decade, though, and so I was pleased to find this discarded Scorpio in a Denver car graveyard last week.

I had a run of eight of the last 12 Junkyard Find articles being GM products, and we're finally going to take a break from The General… for now. Instead of a Trans Sport Montana or first-gen Cavalier, we're going to follow up one gloom-inducing Great Recession vehicle with another: an ultra-rare example of the single-model-year Kia Borrego, found in a Denver car graveyard last week.

Seven of the past 11 doomed vehicles covered in this series have been General Motors products, so it's probably time to switch to… oh, to hell with it, I just found one of the very last Saturns in a Denver-area car graveyard and I must write about it immediately.

The General put some odd-looking rear bodywork on his cars during the mid-to-late Malaise Era. There was the Olds Cutlass Salon Fastback, of course, and the 1977-1979 full-sized Chevy coupes with wraparound rear glass. I've long thought that the "bustleback" 1980-1985 Cadillac Seville was even goofier-looking than those two, and I've found this '82 in a Denver-area car graveyard to share with you.

I'm always looking for vehicles with notably large final odometer readings in car graveyards, and this search becomes frustrating with American pickups and vans. I know plenty of these trucks racked up huge final mileage totals, but Detroit mostly stuck with five-digit odometers until ridiculously late in the game. Finally, here's a Chevy Van in a Wyoming junkyard that shows better than 300k on the clock.

The Nissan Sentra has been with us through eight generations, first appearing on North American shores as a 1982 model. The rust-prone Sentras from the first couple of years are very difficult to find in junkyards now, so I was pleased to run across this '83 in a Northern California yard recently.

When you know you're a vehicle's final owner, why not glue stuff all over it? During my extensive international junkyard travels, I've documented plenty of examples of this type of art car. Here's an early Chevy S-10, found in a Denver car graveyard with a generous coating of cassette tapes and bottle caps.

Which of The General's Should Have Been Game-Changers But Weren't vehicles most makes the ghost of Alfred P. Sloan want to rise up and haunt his bumbling successors? The Corvair? The Citation? The Vega? The Allanté? The Aztek? How about today's Junkyard Find, the final-year Pontiac Fiero?

Chinese cars! The once-expected flood of new vehicles from 中国 hasn't materialized in the United States and shows no signs of arriving soon, but the first mass-produced cars built in China reached our shores back in 2016. Those were the original Buick Envisions, and I've found a crashed example in a northeastern Colorado car graveyard.

The last true station wagon offered new in American Ford dealerships was the 2007 Focus (no, the Flex doesn't count). Just a few years before the demise of the Focus wagon, the final Taurus wagons came off the Hapeville line. Here's one of those cars, found last year at a boneyard about 250 miles to the northeast of its birthplace.

We haven't seen a Fox Mustang— in fact, any Mustang— in this series since 2021, and that's just too long for the generation of Mustang that only dropped below 100,000 total sales for two of its 15 model years. Here's a vividly striped '82 at a car graveyard on a street named Dismantle Court near Sacramento.

The first decade of our current century, bookended by the Dot-Com Crash and the Great Recession, was a grim period for The General. This publication chronicled quite a bit of GM's pain with the General Motors Death Watch series, which began in 2005, and announced the end for the Pontiac Division in the spring of 2009. Today's Junkyard Find is a long-forgotten performance Pontiac from that era, found in a boneyard in northeastern Colorado.

Chrysler began selling Mitsubishi Colt Galants with Dodge badging in North America all the way back in 1971, and the Colt stayed available here for nearly a quarter-century after that. Here's one of the very last Dodge Colt hatchbacks Americans could buy, found in a Denver-area self-service yard last year.

The General's 1990-1996 U-Body "Dustbuster" minivans were available in North America wearing Chevrolet, Pontiac or Oldsmobile badging. There was a time when it was easy to find these vans in car graveyards, but they've become junkyard rarities in recent years. Here's a nicely preserved Silhouette, found in Nevada last summer.

While I've found a couple of 1991-1994 Sentra SE-R s during my junkyard travels, the most recent find was in 2016 and I'm not holding my breath about finding more. But wait! Nissan brought back the SE-R designation later in the decade, while reviving the old 200SX name at the same time. Here's one of those cars, found in a Denver boneyard last week.

I love writing about Daewoos when I'm on the junkyard beat. Part of this is due to the action-packed rise and fall of the Daewoo brand here, the 1999-2002 rollercoaster ride that included the company's CEO going on the lam to evade embezzlement charges, but mostly it's because of Daewoo's fascinating role in The General's Greater East Asia Co-Misery Sphere.

Here's a rare example of the little Daewoo that started it all, found in a northeastern Colorado self-service yard a couple of months ago.

The final Dodge Omnis and Plymouth Horizons were sold as 1990 models and their price tags were hilariously cheap in the final years, so I still find quite a few Omnirizons during my junkyard travels. Some of the more obscure Omnirizon-derived vehicles are nearly extinct, however, so I was excited to find this Turismo at the same northeastern Colorado boneyard that gave us the quadra-Corvan Junkyard Find a week ago.

Would you believe that we haven't seen a genuine Detroit machine in this series since 2024? Sure, we got a low-production accessible taxi and a Chevrolet-badged Daewoo built in India back in January, but their connections to the Motor City were tenuous at best. Today we fix that, with a foursome of distressed Chevrolet FC95 Corvairs in an old-timey boneyard about 30 miles north of Denver, Colorado.

There are certain milestone vehicles I have worked at checking off a personal list as I roam the junkyards of the land. The last of the Oldsmobiles or Plymouths or Pontiacs or Studebakers, for example, or the first of the Camrys or del Sols or Altimas. For at least a decade now, I've been scouring the boneyards for an example of the very last non-truck Isuzu model sold in the United States: A 1993 Stylus. Finally, success in Colorado Springs!

Back in the first half of the 2000s, BMW E30s were as plentiful in California car graveyards as are E46s and E90s today, maybe even more so. They still show up occasionally at the Golden State yards with "Pick" and/or "Pull" in their names today, despite what Internet Car Experts may say, and you can even find the quicker non-orthodontist-spec models if you look for them. Say, this first-year 325iS at the same East Bay Pick-n-Pull that now has five first-gen Nissan Leafs in stock.

One of my favorite things to do while exploring American car graveyards is searching for very early examples of vehicles made by marques new to the United States market. This has been a challenge with Kia, because Kia Motors America got off to such a slow sales start and almost none of the handful of mid-1990s vehicles sold are still around several decades later. Here's one of the first Sportages brought to our shores, found in a yard south of Denver, Colorado.

When a new car model hits showrooms, you can assume an average of 10-15 years before it begins showing up in quantity at the big American self-service car graveyards (unless it's especially badly built and/or unable to retain resale value, e.g., early Hyundai Excel, Chrysler 200). The Nissan Leaf first hit our streets as a 2011 model, thus making it the first EV to be reasonably easy— or at least possible— to find at your local Ewe Pullet. Here's a quintet of first-generation Leafs (Leaves?) at a San Francisco Bay Area boneyard.