The Best Junkyard Finds of 2017
Starting with a 1981 Fox-body Ford Granada and ending with a 1989 Chrysler New Yorker Landau Mark Cross Edition, the eighth year of the Down On the Junkyard series featured 52 discarded cars that I found sufficiently interesting to be worth photographing. They ranged in age from seven to 51 years old, were built in locations ranging from Abingdon to Aichi, and ended their respective roads in conditions varying from basket case to pretty clean.
Here are my favorite ten, the ones that got me the most worked up when I first spotted them gleaming from within the junkyard chaff, presented in model-year sequence.
1966 Chevrolet Impala Sport Sedan
1967 Chevrolet P20 Adventure Line Motorhome
601,173-mile 1987 Mercedes-Benz 190E
1989 Ford Tempo All Wheel Drive
1991 Toyota Camry DX with V6 engine and manual transmission
1993 Plymouth Voyager with manual transmission
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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Jack Baruth's articles and the Junkyard Finds series are the two best things about TTAC. As a Brit observing the American car world from afar, these little pieces of junkyard history are fascinating. It's interesting to compare attitudes on both sides of the Atlantic. In the UK, our cars (a lot of Ford and GM, with some German and Japanese cars as well) go to the junkyard at an average age of 13 years old, thanks to our tough annual inspection and damp, salty roads. On TTAC, if a car from the early 2000s is featured in the junkyard without major accident damage, people will criticize it for dying too early.
>Have you ever seen a Tempo AWD in person? I’ve actually driven one. My high school girlfriend had one. I think it was a ‘92. I remember her saying it would break a u-joint if the AWD was engaged, so unfortunately I never got to experience the Tempo under 4 wheel power. I knew it was an odd duck even back then. Never saw one before or after that...