Displaying Items By Tag: 2021

I live in Denver, where Subarus rule the roads, and that means that all my local car graveyards are packed with worn-out vehicles displaying the Pleiades logo on their battered grilles. These days, most of those discarded Subarus will be second- and third-generation Legacies of the 1995-2005 period, mostly Outback wagons, so I'll be making an effort to document some of the 1990-1994 first-gen cars before they become junkyard rarities. Here's an optioned-up 1994 Legacy sedan, looking very outdoorsy in a yard located near the Dakota Hogback south of Denver.

The introduction of the North American version of the third-generation Nissan Sunny couldn't have been timed better: just months after the global economic gut-punch of the 1973 Oil Crisis. This car, known as the Datsun B210 on these shores, was a flyweight rear-driver with endearing looks and excellent fuel economy, and it sold like mad during its 1974-1978 run. Rust killed most B210s quickly in the corrosion-prone regions of the continent, but this orange '78 lived in Arizona and managed to hang on until age 42.

Remember the front-wheel-drive Dodge and Plymouth Colts (not to mention the Plymouth Champ and Eagle Summit) of the late 1970s through the middle 1990s? Those were Mitsubishi Mirages, and you could buy them here with Mitsubishi badging from 1985 through 2002. Then, for the 2014 model year, the Mirage returned to North America, as the cheapest new car you could buy here. Now, barely a half-decade later, I'm seeing significant quantities of these Mirages in the car graveyards I frequent. Here's a pretty clean '15 in a yard located within sight of Pikes Peak in Colorado.

Honda beat Toyota and Nissan in the race to bring a luxury marque to North America, introducing us to the Acura brand for the 1986 model year. Acura shoppers could buy a luxed-up, more powerful Civic (the Integra) that year, while the real high-rollers went for a smooth-looking, V6-powered luxury sedan co-developed by Rover and Honda: the Legend. That was quite a leap for a company that had been selling tiny cars with two-cylinder motorcycle engines just 15 years earlier, but the 1973-1985 period had been spectacularly good times for Honda. The early Legend sold very well in California, and that's where I found this high-mile '87 a couple of months back.

Mazda built generation after generation of the Familia, starting with the Giugiaro-styled machines of the 1960s. The first Familia that sold well in North America was called the GLC (for "Great Little Car"), and it began life as a rear-wheel-drive cousin to the RX-7 before the Familia went to a front-wheel-drive platform for the 1981 model year. The GLC name stuck around these parts through 1985 — and I've documented a few discarded examples of these now-rare machines during my junkyard travels — before getting the 323 name starting in the 1986 model year. It's no sweat to find 1990s 323s in junkyards, but I've been scouring the car graveyards of the land for the elusive early 323 and, finally, found this moss-encrusted '86 in a San Francisco Bay Area yard.

Due to the runaway success of the Subaru Outback wagon based on the third-generation Legacy, which appeared in North America for the 2000 model year, nearly all of the discarded 2000-2004 Subarus I find in my local Denver junkyards are these dime-a-dozen longroofs, mostly with H4 engines and automatic transmissions (though I do manage to run across the occasional rare H6 model). For a discarded example of the super-rare non-Outback Legacy GT sedan with manual transmission, I had to travel all the way to a Northern California car graveyard. Here it is!

It seems that the Sentra has always been with us, but in fact the very first Sentras didn't show up in North America until the 1982 model year. This gas-sipping econobox became an immediate sales smash hit over here, and the Japanese-built 1982-1986 cars elbowed aside many a Civic and Corolla in the battle for American sales. Sentras began rolling out of Nissan's new Tennessee factory in 1985, just before the debut of the second-gen version, and so today's Junkyard Gem in Denver is one of the very last of the Kanagawa-built Sentras sold in the United States.