Junkyard Find: 1994 Dodge Shadow ES
These cars were pretty cheap, and they weren’t slow (by mid-90s standards).
That is, they weren’t slow when equipped with the Mitsubishi 6G72 V6, as this car is. Though, as we’ve seen, this engine doesn’t guarantee reliability.
The early 90s are notable for having introduced the world to fake wood trim that was much more realistic than the Tormented Souls In Hell Simu-Wood™ of the 1970s and 1980s. Look, 20 years old and not faded or cracked!
There oughta be a law.
The snow is obscuring the mean-looking hood bulge with V6 emblems, but it’s there.
With manual transmission, this sort of car wouldn’t be a bad first car for a teenager interested in making a cheap machine to take to test-n-tune night. Grab the turbo hardware off a wrecked Stealth, experience the joys of Xtreem Torque Steer®.
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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I owned three of these cars. An 87 Sundance auto, a white 92 Sundance Duster manual V6, and a red 93 v6 Duster manual. The cars were pretty good cars. The Mitsu V6 had the nicest note I have ever heard coming from a V6. The car was simple, sturdy, and cheap to fix...unless you lost the gear box. You could stuff the car with a massive amount of cargo because it wide. The 92 I owned was a heavily modified V6 and could do the quarter in about 15 seconds. It was dinoed at 186hp at the crank. It was a true beast with a bullet muffler and an exhaust side pipe. It had Koni shocks/struts and custom sway bars. I embarrassed a lot of drivers with it. These cars get killed by automotive glitterati but if you a are bare bones car enthusiast these cars could be tons of fun in either turbo four or V6 configurations. If you wanted a car in the 12s you could get it with the 2.2 Turbo setup with the right mods.
Had a '94 with the 2.2 and 3 speed auto. Dreadfully slow, and I always wondered what the Shadow would have been like with the V6 or the high-torque 2.5 Turbo. Good handling though.