Junkyard Find: 1993 Hyundai Excel
The first-gen Hyundai Excel was sold in the United States for the 1986 through 1989 model years, and it was a supremely bad automobile. So bad, in fact, that most of them were used up and crushed by the middle of the 1990s. Because of their rarity today, I always photograph early Excels when I see them (including this ’86, this ’87, and this ’88). Hyundai did a fairly extensive cosmetic facelift for the 1990 Excel, and this generation was sold though the 1994 model year. The second-gen version was much more reliable than the first— it would have been hard not to improve upon the fantastically crappy 1986-89 Excels— but by that time just about everybody knew to stay away from the model. That makes these cars even harder to find than the initially-hot-selling first-gen Excels. Here’s a ’93 that I spotted at a self-service yard in Denver.
A modern EFI system on the licensed-from-Mitsubishi engine helped a lot.
This car barely cracked six figures on the odometer, but that’s still a lot better than most of its predecessors.
Here we see a happy South Korean family getting all schmaltzy with their ’93 Excel.
Just a decade before, South Korean car ads were much more macho, as seen in this Daewoo Maepsy ad.
By the time of the second-gen Excel, you could get a sporty coupe version (called the Scoupe in North America and the S Coupe in Europe). I’ve managed to find just one junkyard Scoupe since beginning this series.
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, Hagerty and The Truth About Cars.
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I'm not surprised no parts are sold, no one wants any!
There was a next generation. It was the Accent in 95. My friend has one as well. Bought stripped, in black, under 7 grand. He drove it until 2 years ago. 40 mpg, rarely gave him an issue, 200k+ miles. He sold it for $800 to his Hyundai serviceman. It was an acceptable car and he got his monies worth. Wish there was a simple under 8 grand car out today, might be doable with a new Accent if there was some incentives, although they are a little different engineering wise.