Hammer Time: Who White Trashed This Car?

My opinion is that often the method in which an owner takes care of a vehicle depends on a) its reliability, and b) its fit-and-finish. After nine or ten years, certain vehicle start to look very long-in-the-tooth--particularly originating from the late nineties and early two-thousands. But picture this: You've got a 1998 BMW E38 7-Series whose transmission seems unable to climb to the fifth gear, paint peeling on the roof, and only half of the pixels on the LCD displays functioning. All of the aforementioned is realistic on any product made by the blue roundel. And once your BMW starts to exhibit cost-prohibitive or inevitable malfunctions, you begin to have little inclination to maintain its cosmetic upkeep, and suddenly all of those dirt spots, scratches, and the big dents from when that teenager in the Mitsubishi ricer rear-ended you at an intersection matter that much less. And this is on a German luxury car. Imagine the considerably-less-opulent-when-new Pontiac Grand Prix (which was borne into one of General Motors' darkest periods and which was prone to falling apart if so much as looked at the wrong way) and voila--you have the very instance pictured above.

The worst one was a 1988 Caravan a friend bought at a police auction for $350 on the coldest day of the year. It had been chewed on by a dog that made my Pit Bull mix look like a Teacup Poodle! My friend didn't really care, he bought it for one thing, to lug parts for his truck and car restoration projects home, so the interior wasn't a big deal. The car had been sprayed with that cherry smelling deodorizer that made my nose run, and when we opened the doors up to look at it, we didn't smell what it was covering up! That obvious as soon as it warmed up inside. The urine smell was activated by the heat, and we had to open up the windows just to be able to open our eyes! The power windows were dead, so we opened up the sliding door and the "wings". When we got it home, we spent about a half hour yanking urine soaked carpet out of it. My friend then sprayed the insides with water and the skunk smell came to life too. A trip to the store for a half dozen boxes of baking soda and some "deskunk", and eventually, the smells became tolerable. We found a bunch of receipts from some junkyard under the front seats, and my friend called up the place and we found out that the Caravan was used as a doghouse for the two junkyard dogs, one of which was ancient and had bladder issues. When the old one died, they sold the van to some guy and three months later, it wound up at the auction. They said they built a doghouse for the dog. He had that thing for about 7 years, and no matter what he did, you could still smell piss and skunk when it got humid or something was spilled on the floor. My dog was kind of the same way, whenever he got wet, you could smell the skunk that sprayed him a couple years before. No matter how many baths and how much "deskunk" we used, it never went away. When the engine finally went, it got scrapped, and he got almost what he paid for it. The replacement 1995 Caravan was almost as bad inside, but was urine and skunk free.

Any A body Olds Cutlass Ciera or Buick Century. Most well past their prime with missing mouldings, mismatched tires, filthy interiors.

Most of the 80s/90's GM cars are getting crushed here in salty Chicago. A, N, L and 90's W's are flattened. Luminas and Corsicas are nearly extinct. But favorite "Urban Demo Derby" cars these days are 1998-2005 J cars, Pontiac GA/GPs, Century/Regals. Ford Tauruses/Contours. Dodge Intrepids/Stratus/Sebrings, and FWD 300M's. For imports, Mitsu Galants/Lancers/Eclipse, Suzuki Forenzas and older Sonatas/Elantras too. Only really old pre 99 Toyotas, Hondas, and Nissans are hanging in there in working class areas. 2000's T/H/N are still clean with first owner. But, the current the #1 beat to shyt car, the 1997-2005 Malibu/Classic rentals! Successor to the beloved Corsica. Fresh on the scene now are Calibers, Cobalts, and Avenger/Sebrings ready for thrashing.