Junkyard Find: 1978 Lancia Beta
The turnover of inventory at self-service junkyards near major West Coast ports is extremely quick, what with the hunger of Chinese industry for scrap steel; some yards keep vehicles for just a month or two before crushing them. This steel-company-owned yard in Oakland, California, gets some interesting machinery, but a Lancia Beta? I can’t recall the last time I saw a Beta in any condition, but Volvo parts hunter David ran across this ’78 while seeking parts for his 240.
What would have led an American car buyer in 1978 to pay $8,803, about a grand more than a new Datsun 280Z and 500 bucks less than a new BMW 320i, for a notoriously rust-prone Italian orphan with just 86 horsepower and front-wheel-drive?
Speaking of rust, you don’t often see this sort of thing on California cars (unless they live within salt-spray range of the Pacific Ocean in San Francisco). According to David, who shot these photos for us, “The A pillars are shot through so badly that the windshield popped.”
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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In the '80s, if you had a Beta HPE, you were my absolute hero. I'm better now.
I wonder if those A-pillars can be fixed. If the body shell, window glass and related accessories were salvageable, could this be turned into a tuner car?