Junkyard Find: Mitsubishi 3000GT Stripped In Feeding Frenzy
There are some vehicles that I know will get picked clean within days of showing up in a self-serve wrecking yard. For example, the Toyota Land Cruiser— say, this ’71 or even this ’85. Sixth-gen Honda Civics go the same way. But this 1996 Mitsubishi 3000GT? Apparently, the hunger for 3000GT/Stealth parts is high in the Denver area.
The instrument cluster had already been grabbed when I first saw this car in September, but otherwise the interior was fairly complete. A month later, not much remains.
Suspension, engine, bumper— all gone.
Even the very 1990s plastic cladding panels will live on in some other GTO.
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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This is a prime example of the need for Junkyard Finds needing to go to 'yards 'off the beaten path'...
In Utah where I live the Subaru Outbacks are the ones picked clean- it's rare to find a late '90s Outback with an EJ25 after a few days with the engine still in place, even if there's no way to tell whether the head gaskets are good. Curiously, I see a lot of standard Legacys go to the crusher with their EJ22 engines in place, even though it's a much more robust engine and a super easy swap for a faulty EJ25. Post-2000 Outbacks are rare as hens' teeth and usually go to the crusher as bare skeletons. The G20s in the self-serve yards I go to are usually pretty intact when they go to the crushers.