Junkyard Find, Cold Blasted Edition: 1991 Mitsubishi Galant
I’m always on the lookout for weird Mitsubishi products when I’m visiting wrecking yards, but the dawn of the 1990s brought less distinctive styling to Mitsubishis and they tend to hide in the background as I’m walking the rows of cast-off machines. The bullet holes in this 21-year-old Galant, however, caught my eye. We’ll return to the cars of the Brain Melting Vintage Junkyard soon, but today we’re going back to the “traditional” Colorado self-service yard.
I’m pretty sure that Galant sales figures didn’t have Toyota or Honda execs losing any sleep back in the day, and my recent experience with a rented ’11 Galant convinced me that the Camry and Accord still have nothing to fear.
This one didn’t make it to 200,000 miles, though 150,000 seems respectable for a Mitsubishi.
As for the bullet holes, it appears that someone went all gangsta-style on this car and fired a bunch of handgun rounds (I’m sure there’s a reader who can identify the year, make, and model of the firearm just by looking at the holes) through the windshield into the front seats. The holes in the seats are at heart level, but the lack of blood and/or police-impound stickers indicate that the car was unoccupied during the shooting.
The slugs passed through the windshield, front and rear seats, and the sheet metal behind the seat before coming to a halt in the trunk.
I used to see this sort of thing all the time in Oakland junkyards during the crack wars of the early 1990s, and you still see the occasional bullet hole in junked California cars. This is the first I’ve seen in a Denver yard.
Will Galants of this era ever have any collector value? As Chou En-Lai (perhaps) said about the significance of the French Revolution, it’s too early to tell.
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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The really strange one was the Galant Sigma. An upscale version of the Galant that competed with Maxima, 929 and Cressida.
A little hard to tell due to no real reference scale but I'm going with 7.62 x 25 Tokarev. Probably fired out of a CZ 52, they were dirt cheap for quite a while with a lot of surplus soviet ammo out there. Very popular with the urban thug on a budget.