The Truth About Cars » Galant

Junkyard Find: 1989 Mitsubishi Sigma

Murilee Martin — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 13:00:50 +0000

Remember the Mitsubishi Sigma? Nobody does! It was a semi-oddball four-door hardtop version of the Galant that was sold in the United States just for the 1989 and 1990 model years, and I believe this car— which I spotted at a San Francisco Bay Area self-service yard over the weekend— is the first one I’ve ever seen in person.
Four-door hardtops were big in the 1960s, but you didn’t have a lot of choices in that department by 1989. Mitsubishis had only been available in North America with non-Chrysler badging for a half-dozen years when this car was new, and Mitsubishi salesmen must have experienced major bouts of hopelessness when trying to convince Camry and Maxima shoppers to buy the Sigma instead.
I’d thought the Big Nose HVAC Guy was a Cordia-only thing, but it turns out that many Mitsubishis of the 1980s used this graphic.
The forward-stop-backward arrows on the shifter positions were a nice, if somewhat puzzling, Mitsubishi-style touch.
Since a lot of Detroit slushboxes were still three-speeds in 1989, the shifter handle got this bit of bragging.
I’m going to keep my eyes open for more Sigmas now, because they must be out there!

Junkyard Find, Cold Blasted Edition: 1991 Mitsubishi Galant

Murilee Martin — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 13:00:43 +0000

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.

Junkyard Find: 1982 Plymouth Sapporo

Murilee Martin — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 14:00:50 +0000

When you find a ’72 Dodge Colt wagon and an ’83 Mitsubishi Cordia within 15 feet of one another in a self-service junkyard, what more could you ask for? Why, you could go for the Mitsubishi Trifecta and ask for a Plymouth Sapporo right next to both of them!
During my recent trip to California, I dropped by one of my old junkyard haunts and found this scene: Sapporo and Colt on the left, Cordia on the right (the remainder of the Chrysler/Mitsubishi section is mostly LHs and Neons, and it will remain so for the next decade or so).
The Sapporo was a Mitsubishi Galant Lambda; its Dodge sibling was badged as a Challenger.
It was a rear-wheel-drive machine with a big four-cylinder making a not-too-bad-for-Late-Malaise 100 horses. Not a bad car, but nothing about it really stood out from the pack.
Thanks to the car-versus-pole damage on the front, this example managed to avoid the handful of Northern California vintage-Mitsubishi fans that might have restored it. Next stop: Chinese container ship at the Port of Oakland.