Displaying Items By Tag: Times

Thanks to a certain unwelcome virus, the Toyota Corona's image has taken a bit of a beating over the past year or so. My very first car was a 1969 Corona sedan that cost 50 bucks, and I now own a chopped, customized 1969 Corona coupe that Boyd Coddington proclaimed as the "Coolest Car in L.A." a quarter-century back. For these reasons, I document every single Corona I find in car graveyards, and here's the latest: a well-worn 1979 Corona station wagon in a Denver-area yard.

Living in Denver, I have the opportunity to view just about every model of Subaru sold since the late 1970s in my local car boneyards, from the "Making Love In a Subaru" era of super-cheap tiny cars all the way through to the odd-looking B9 Tribecas. Since the third-generation Outback wagons are now at least 16 years old, they've begun showing up in vast quantities here (which works well for me, since I'd like to upgrade my '04 Outback with options it didn't have when new). Most of these cars aren't sufficiently interesting to achieve Junkyard Gem status, though I have documented a McIntosh-audio-equipped Outback VDC and a fully-loaded Outback H6 in recent years, but today's car had such a dramatic — if horribly impractical — interior that I felt compelled to photograph it.

Before there was the front-wheel-drive Nissan Maxima we all know today, there was the rear-wheel-drive Datsun 810, which was pretty close to a sedan version of the famous Z-Car. The 810 begat the Datsun 810 Maxima, which begat the Datsun Maxima, which begat the Datsun Maxima By Nissan, which begat the final rear-wheel-drive Maxima of 1984. After that, the Maxima got a 300ZX V6 engine, but became front-wheel-drive. Today's Junkyard Gem is one of those incredibly rare straight-six/rear-wheel-drive Maximas of the early "The Name Is Nissan" era, found in a Denver-area self-service yard earlier this month.

As a junkyard aficionado living in Denver, I get regular opportunities to study the history of the Pleiades-badged brand every time I hit the IMPORTS section at one of my local yards. You won't find any Subaru 360s in U-Wrench yards these days (I haven't seen a discarded 360 since the early 1980s), but I still find plenty of Malaise-Era Subarus from the period during which they were mocked for their small size in novelty songs. Here's a seriously loaded (by early-1980s standards) 1982 Subaru Leone four-wheel-drive wagon, found last fall in a yard just south of Denver.

If you want a cheap, rock-and-stick-simple, gas-sipping car that can handle mud and snow without flinching, you'd have a tough time surpassing the 1983-1988 Toyota Tercel 4WD wagon. Known as the Sprinter Carib in Japan, these cartoonish-looking little wagons proved quite popular in North America, despite their tippy handling and patience-building double-digit horsepower, and I still find plenty of them in junkyards to this day. Here's a first-model-year example with the luxurious (by early-1980s Tercel standards) SR5 top trim level, found in a Denver yard last winter.

Transcript: Pioneer wagon bed for Wild West fanatics. Spend your sleepy nights on a wagon bed. The twin bed from Hitchman Homestead can be assembled for indoor or outdoor slumber. It's made from a steel frame. Hitchman Homestead claims that it can break down for easy setup anywhere. The wagon bed comes with a bonnet, toy box, flip down steps, and slide-out drawer. Goodnight Pioneer Wagon Twin Bed is priced at $6,750. Click here to check it out for yourself. 

It's easy to forget that Mitsubishi was once upon a time brave enough to offer a wagon bodystyle with its iconic Lancer Evolution. These longroof versions were created for the JDM market only and finding one outside the land of the Rising Sun is pretty surprising.