Junkyard Find: 1989 Peugeot 405 S
Peugeot gave up on the North American market after the 1991 model year, thanks to poor sales of their new 405. I haven’t seen one of these cars on the street for at least 15 years, and junkyard sightings have been correspondingly rare. When I spotted this car at a Northern California self-serve yard a couple months back, it took me a moment to figure out what it was.
Nearly 200,000 miles on the clock, which is comparable to what I see on (non-Mitsubishi) Japanese cars of the same era.
When the company that built your car retreats from your continent, keeping it on the street becomes quite a challenge. This one made it to age 24.
The only Peugeot I’ve ever owned was a 504 that came with a bunch of Linda Ronstadt 8-tracks. I liked that car, in spite of its frequent breakdowns (yes, I know, the 504 is supposedly bulletproof everywhere else in the world).
We have a few Peugeot 405 Mi16s racing in the 24 Hours of LeMons (they’re quite affordable, i.e. less than scrap value in most cases). They’re somewhat quick, but they tend to be pretty blow-uppy. Here’s one depositing a connecting rod in the windshield of a following car.
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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It was a good handling car. It was prized for good handling and was better as a car than any Honda or Toyota by the order of magnitude. As a used car it sucks therefore it is not a good car for America where people care only about reliability and nothing else. It cannot last 192K miles though, it is simply impossible - it would be nothing but a miracle. My guess is odometer shows 192K km and I can imagine what kind of effort it took to maintain it up to these 192K kms. Russian cars also can last 192K kms but you have to replace every part over time (some Russians buy two Ladas to merge them into the one eventually).
Sadly late to the party on this one, having only just run across the post in a tangental Google search. Amusingly, this piece was published one day after I purchased another 405 Mi16 (this time a 1991; previous one was a 1989 model) to use as a daily driver after seven years without one. I may be biased, but they really are a fantastic car. Take care of them properly and they're far from a nightmare, but get one that's been monkeyed with and you can be in for quite a bit of agony. The first one I ever drove was a non-turbo diesel. Slow, but was still a great car to drive - handled well, had great steering and brakes, was *very* comfortable, and routinely managed something in the region of 45mpg (Imperial) at a constant 70-80mph. On moving to the US, my first car was a 1989 405DL. Base model - power nothing (apart from the steering), cloth seats, and the 4-speed auto. The A/C worked surprisingly well, but I eventually decided that the button that activated it actually stood for 'acceleration control', because activating it was more than the combination of the 110bhp and autobox could were really up to. Still, was an excellent highway cruiser (once you got it up to speed), and was sadly totalled in a hit-and-run. Had Peugeot known how to approach the US market properly, this car could potentially have saved their bacon. Bringing in the 205 and 605 would also have helped, but in the end it didn't matter. A comeback would be nice, but it's hard to see how their products would offer anything in this day and age that an established marque already doesn't.