Junkyard Find: 1979 Honda Accord LX
The first-generation Accord is one of the most important cars of postwar North America… but they tend to be invisible to me when I walk past one in the junkyard or on the street. This Accord, with its distinctive body shape, has been with us for so long that it’s just background. Here’s an extremely typical brown Malaise Era Accord LX, of the sort that forced every other maker of compact cars to change everything… or die.
Like the ’75 Corolla we saw a few days ago, the original Accord would be a truly punitive commuter by today’s standards. Noisy, cramped, underpowered, and good for maybe 200,000 miles in most cases (an astonishing figure in 1979, sort of ho-hum in 2012). But compared to the competition, the Accord stood ten feet tall. Honda dealers demanded way over list price and their demands were met.
These cars didn’t really disappear from the streets until about ten years ago, at which point they suddenly vanished. You still see the occasional first-gen Accord buzzing along, but it’s not worth fixing one when the head gasket finally goes, or the upholstery just gets too hooptified.
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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This Accord LX lasted a lot longer than the Infiniti G20 next to it.
Sold my 67 MGB and bought a 79 Accord just like this one to drive to college. Light years ahead of the MG. Awesome roadtrip car. Loved that fresh air vent. Saw one the other day. Tiny. Seemed normal back then.