Junkyard Find: 2000 Pontiac Grand Am GT
The final iteration of the Grand Am, which was built for the 1999 through 2005 model years, had all the looked-bad-after-five-years plastic cladding that made 1990s GM cars so forgettable and RAM AIR! GM cars of this vintage are still so commonplace in high-turnover self-serve wrecking yards that it takes something special for me to break out the camera for such a car; in this series so far, we’ve seen this supercharged Grand Prix GTP, this Beretta Z26, this Cavalier Z24, and this Pontiac Sunfire, and now it’s the Grand Am’s turn.
The cladding on this car looks to be in OK shape, unusually.
The 3400 pushrod V6 in the Grand Am GT made 175 horsepower, with five of those horses coming courtesy of the functional Ram Air system.
This one’s an automatic, and it looks like it was in fairly decent shape before the front end got wrecked and most of the good parts were grabbed by junkyard shoppers.
Will we see fanatical 99-05 Grand Am GT restorers a couple of decades from now?
One nice thing about Denver junkyards is that you can see the Rockies in the background.
“It’s a tough world. Now there’s one exciting car actually designed to take it.”
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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I bought and restored 3 of these cars just last summer. a 1999, a 2000 and a 2001. The 01 only 86k on the clock when I bought it and after a new paint job and some minor TLC, I flipped the car for the $2300 I paid for it, to get $5500 out of it, making myself a nice profit of $1,000.00 the 2000, had 192k on the clock and a skipping trans due to bad Pressure Valves. a Quick trip to a U-Pull it yard in Hazelton, PA yielded me an engine and tranny out of the same model year for $400, a swap of the gold interior to a silver interior all in. $700 for the car, motor/trans $400, interior parts $175.00 and a quick Paint Job $700, $1900 in $2300 out. The 1999 I kept as it had 135k on the lcok but already had a newer engine. It is my Winter buggy.
Aw my first car was a Grand Am. It was a 1988. I purchased it for $900 in 1999 with 247,000 miles on the odometer. I drove it for a year and about 10,000 miles and later sold it for $950. I called her Ghetto Maria. She was not glamorous, my boyfriend at the time refused to ride in her...but she always got me to his house with never a problem.