Junkyard Find: 1972 Plymouth Valiant Sedan
There was a time when the late-60s/early-70s Dodge Dart/Plymouth Valiant sedan was the generic automobile in the United States, possibly the most invisible car on American roads. Swimming-pool blue and this queasy shade of green were the most common colors, and the cars were so cheap to maintain that they survived in everyday use much longer than most of their peers. You don’t see the old A-bodies so much these days, but enough remain that they continue to show up in big self-service wrecking yards. Here’s one that I saw in Northern California last week.
So far in this series, we’ve seen this ’60 Valiant wagon, this ’61 Valiant, this ’63 Dart, this ’64 Valiant wagon, this ’67 Valiant, this ’66 Dart, this ’68 Valiant Signet, this ’73 Valiant, this ’75 Duster, and this ’75 Dart, this ’75 Dart, and now today’s ’72 Valiant. Slant-6 engine, like most of them.
Plenty of indicators that this Valiant’s last owner was a young guy.
Back in the early 1970s, AM radio offered some decent music, but now it’s tough to find much other than right-wing talk radio and religious sermons in Cantonese.
From what I can tell, Driven Blackout is the Advance Auto house brand of car air-freshener.
This Valiant was on pace to hit 500,000 miles when this happened.
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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Every time a Junkyard Find featuring a Mopar product is shown, I *always* see several LH cars (Intrepid, Concorde, et al) not too far away from the subject vehicle. It never fails. In this example, there's two 1998-2004 Intrepids behind this Valiant, and it sits next to a 1993-97 Eagle Vision (the rarest of them all). Sad. As a fan of the platform and a former owner of two LH vehicles which have been really great to me: a 1997 Concorde and, later, a 2004 Intrepid with the better 3.5 V6) I'm quite discouraged if not afraid about the reality: they're slipping away. They're great cars that look very nice if they're looked after. It seems like it is becoming a rare thing to see an LH on the road, first or second generation, and it's been that way for about five years or so. As for the second-gen LH, they can't all have the dreaded 2.7L engine. The transmissions will last with care. Have the BHPH/Craigslist types taken possession of them all? If so, that explains why--BHPH cars are almost always one step away from the crusher, regardless if it's a flimsy Hyundai or a sturdy Mercedes. Now they've moved on to the 300s, the Chargers and the Magnums--which will meet the same fate of a life cut short due to a lack of maintenance and care (oh well, I don't like the LX as much as I do the LH). I'd still have mine if the '97 didn't get totalled while parked on the street and the '04 didn't get traded for a Chrysler 200. I almost want to buy a gently used LH before they're all gone, but I only have room in my garage for one car.
I see lots of cosmetically perfect PT's in the Pick 'N Save Junk Yards ~ apparently they have little resale value . My buddy bought one when they first came out and pin striped it, did custom upholstery , custom exhaust on and on .... it was pristine right until the day the tranny died and he said it wasn't worth fixing so off it went.... -Nate