It's usually Toyota compact pickups that first spring to mind when talking longevity or off-road ability, but Nissan's compact trucks have some credibility in those areas as well, as demonstrated by this 1988 Nissan Hardbody Desert Runner pickup. Up for offer right now on the auction site Cars & Bids, this Hardbody 4x4 also sports an extroverted red-and-blue graphics package that makes this Nissan pickup guaranteed to turn heads.

We will admit to having totally forgotten about this original Desert Runner — or, more accurately, having never been aware of it. (The nameplate was resurrected for and an off-road-themed 4x2 Frontier offered from 2002 to 2004 and again from 2013 to 2019.) This 1988 model reportedly was a one-year-only special edition that was built to commemorate Nissan's off-road racing effort, which included running in the Baja 1000, the Gold Coast 300, and the Mint 400. The standard Nissan 3.0-liter V6 is backed up by a five-speed manual gearbox and four-wheel drive with a two-speed transfer case. The package includes 31-inch tires on chunky triangle-styled wheels, a bed-mounted spare tire, a front push bar with driving lights, a front skid plate, tubular step bars, a roll bar with more driving lights, and a tailgate net. It's believed 1,000 were made.

While Subaru kept the hatchback version of the second-generation Leone available in North America all the way through the late 1980s, the third-generation sedans and wagons went on sale here in 1985. Today's Junkyard Gem is a loaded '88 4WD sedan, found in thoroughly worn-out condition in a junkyard next to Pikes Peak in Colorado.

While this is by no means a low-mileage vehicle, we’re pretty sure somebody is going to pay a lot of money to put such a well-kept and heavily customized FJ62 Toyota Land Cruiser in their garage.

Back in early 2007, when the late Davey G. Johnson got me my first job writing for an automotive publication (well, unless you count writing for the Year One catalogs back in the mid-1990s) and I took on this goofy pen name for real, I didn't quite grasp that any readers might be interested in the stuff I saw during my frequent junkyard trips. So, when I took my crappy Nikon Coolpix 2500 to the now-defunct Pick Your Part in Hayward, California, and saw a super-rare Mazda 323 GTX among all the Tercels and Rabbits in the IMPORTS section, I just took a few shots of this interesting car for my own enjoyment. These days, I'll take more than 100 photographs of a junkyard car of such great historical significance, editing them down to the best couple of dozen, but in March of 2007 I got just three of the 323 GTX. Robert Capa had his Magnificent Eleven at D-Day, and I've got the Magnificent Three of the GTX. Here they are.