Reykjavik Junkyard Mystery Car: Quick, What Is It?

by Murilee Martin

Published: November 14th, 2013

reykjavik junkyard mystery car quick what is it

Last week, Subaru shipped me directly from the Chubba Cheddar Enduro 24 Hours of LeMons at Road America to Iceland, so that I could follow hallowed LeMons tradition and destroy a press car in dramatic fashion. I failed to kill any XV Crosstrek Hybrids, but I did get the opportunity to break away from the Subaru minders and get to do what I really love about traveling: visit exotic foreign wrecking yards! Iceland has a bizarre and unpredictable mix of vehicles on its roads, with the types of car and truck imports varying from month to month based on some inscrutable combination of momentary cheapness and currency-rate numbers, and you’ll see a wide selection of Asian, European, and Detroit machinery in the chilly junkyards of Reykjavik. Ladas next to Ssangyongs next to Dodges! Jason Kavanaugh of Edmunds (more importantly, of the legendary LeMons team, Eyesore Racing) spotted this much-sliced car and suggested that it would make a good Mystery Car for a future Junkyard Find, and he’s right!

So, what is it? It could be from anywhere in the car-making world and most of the body is hacked away, but there are some identifying features if you look closely. You can’t go by the adjacent cars, because this yard lines up its cars in the order in which they were received. I’ll put the answers in the comments tonight.

#DownOnTheJunkyard #Iceland #Junkyard #JunkyardFind #MysteryCar

Murilee Martin

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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4 of 32 comments

Turboprius on Nov 14, 2013

All of those cars look so new. What are they doing at the junkyard already?

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- Battles on Nov 15, 2013
  
  Lots of reasons... Renault are good at built in obsolecence, lots of them get a few thousand miles beyond the warranty and then fail massively. Lots of people, especially in the affluent parts of 'Old' Europe just don't fix things anymore. Renault have been 'safer' than Volvo in some European tests but they achieve that with airbags that mean after a moderate accident, the car needs loads of new airbags and interior parts. My Dad still rolls in an '04 Renault Clio which everyone he knows considers to be prehistoric because thy're on a two year upgrade cycle. The Clio is worked hard and well looked after which, as we all know, is what keeps cars in good health.
  
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- Sinistermisterman on Nov 18, 2013
  
  @Battles In the UK, new MOT test standards are making it even less cost effective to keep an older car on the road. Simple items like damaged rubber gaiters and airbag warning lights are instant fails. Considering the repair cost at your average garage for such items will sometimes be almost as much as the car is worth, 10+ year old cars are getting junked quite regularly for faults which are only incidental, but are too expensive to fix. As for Renaults, I remember an article saying that a few years ago the car most likely to fail it's first MOT test (i.e. when the car is 3 years old) was the Megane, with 40% of cars failing.
  
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NineEleven on Nov 19, 2013

Renault Megane, very common in Europe and specially in Spain and France, where it's made.

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