2000: San Francisco Tow-Auction Cars Fill My Back Yard
Going through my old 2X2X2 35mm stereo slide pairs for posting on Cars In Depth (I’ve been messing around with twin-film-camera 3D for about 15 years now), I came across some shots of the ever-varied fleet of late-80s/early-90s Japanese subcompacts I owned during the heyday of San Francisco’s notorious City Tow car auctions.
That Tercel ended up being a keeper, after I swapped in a Pick-N-Pull transmission; I’d traded my previous Tercel wagon— that one a 4WD model— to a guy who worked at Alternative Tentacles, in exchange for a bunch of the album inserts of the controversial H.R. Giger artwork used in the Dead Kennedys album Frankenchrist. Hmmm… wonder if those are worth anything now? The other two cars in the top photo— a ’90 Tercel hatchback and a ’91 Nissan Sentra coupe— didn’t stick around quite as long. Still, I think the early 90s era was really the golden age of Japanese subcompacts; they all had fuel injection, got great gas mileage, and were still small.
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, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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Lets not rose tint the past. My 90 Sentra was a raucous shitbox on the highway with only a 3-speed auto with no o/d [a GLC/323? would have been my smarter choice]. This Sentra's rear leg was pinched to say the least. I had oil leaks, an air pocket in the rad and the tranny smelt of Deep Woods Off - oh what could that have poss heralded..? Plus the sheetmetal was sooo miserably thin you only had to look at it to make a dent.
Going through my old 2X2X2 35mm stereo slide pairs for posting on Cars In Depth (I’ve been messing around with twin-film-camera 3D for about 15 years now),
Some of Murilee's handiwork: