Down On The Mile High Street: Baffling Honda Accord Pickup
Back in the “good ol’ days” at Jalopnik, Davey Johnson, Jonny Lieberman, and I would spend our days searching for examples of homemade El Camino-ized cartrucks. It sort of peaked in early ’07, when we found the Starionmino, but it’s taken until now for me to find a genuine El Accordamino live and in-person, parked just a block from my house.
I caught it out of the corner of my eye while driving by and thought, “Whoa, a Dodge Rampage parked right in my neighborhood. Cool!” I returned to shoot some photos, because street-driven Rampages are about as common as Aston Martin Lagondas these days, and… wait, what the hell is this thing?
The front half is clearly an ’84 or ’85 Honda Accord, and— in spite of the faded paint and general beater-ness— the conversion job appears to have been very nicely done. I don’t see any of the adobe-grade Bondo, corrugated roofing material, and pop rivets that are the hallmark of the two-12-packs-and-a-torch backyard El Camino-ization job.
I thought that perhaps I might be looking at a Rampage rear half mated to an Accord front half, but a glance at some Rampage photos killed that theory.
The rear strut mounts appear to be very Accord-y, so this may be a heavily modified Accord rear body with a RWD minitruck’s tailgate grafted on. You couldn’t get an Accord wagon in the mid-80s, so it’s not a quick-and-dirty wagon-to-truck hack job.
I’m out of theories about this fine vehicle, and I wasn’t able to track down the owner. Can any of you identify this tailgate? That might be a start…
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.
More by Murilee Martin
Comments
Join the conversation
A little paint and she would be good to go. Too bad you couldn't find the owner I would love more information on this thing.
This vehicle was originally my uncle’s. Burt Davis owned the Honda/Harley Davidson Motorcycle Shop in Dodge City, Kansas. He and his friend, Elton Spena (along with the help of an instructor and some students from the Topeka Vo-Tech School where Elton worked), built it because he wanted a Honda pick-up and Honda did not make one at the time. He found a 1984 Honda Accord that had been hit in the back. The whole vehicle is the Honda. They just cut it behind the back seat and along the back doors taking the back window and the windows of the back doors out. Then they welded the back doors shut and folded the top of the car down behind the front seats. They then put in a back window and the bed for the pick-up and the little triangle pieces behind the front door from an El Camino. The tailgate was from a Dodge Rampart. They put stickers on it for business advertising – if you looked close, you can still see where they were, the corner triangles had the Harley Davidson #1 insignia, a red Honda sticker on the back fender and Harley Davidson lettering in white along the top sides of the bed. The shop used it until my uncle retired, my dad decided he liked it and wanted it so it moved to Colorado. When my son turned 16 (in 2007) it became his first car. My son sold it in May of 2011 when he decided to purchase a different vehicle. We are looking for some photos of it from the early years but haven’t found any yet. If we do, I will post them.