Junkyard Find: 1995 Jeep Cherokee Right-hand Drive
Published: April 23rd, 2018
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The XJ Jeep Cherokee has been in production for nearly 35 years (if you count the BAW Knight S12, which I do) and remains very popular as a daily driver in Colorado, so I see many discarded examples in Denver-area wrecking yards.It takes a special XJ to inspire me to shoot photographs for this series — a pink camouflage paint job, for example, or a tape-stripey Sport Cherokee with manual transmission. A right-hand drive, Japanese-market Cherokee qualifies, so let’s take a look at this one in a Denver self-service yard.
Just the thing for doing rural mail delivery, which is almost certainly the reason this truck was brought back from Japan.
Japanese-built four-wheel-drive trucks weren’t hard to find in Japan in the middle 1990s, but built-for-export RHD Cherokees went there.
This truck’s Japanese owner had it serviced at Autobacs.
Then US Drive Right, an importer of right-hand-drive vehicles intended for postal-carrier use, brought it back to the United States.
Eventually, disaster struck. The problems with driving a RHD vehicle in a LHD country come when you need to turn left or pass on a two-lane rural highway, and it looks like this truck’s driver wasn’t able to see that oncoming vehicle in time.
156,722 kilometers is only 97,383 miles. I’m betting the running gear in this truck was almost certainly grabbed soon after I shot these photos by a savvy junkyard customer who figured it drove to the accident.
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Japan wasn’t the only right-hand drive place to get Cherokees.
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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Interesting story. Which reminds me, a couple a months ago I was in the parking lot of a McDonalds waiting to meet someone when I noticed a new model Jeep Wrangler in the drive-through lane that was RHD. The lady behind the wheel obviously was having issues with picking up her order that was delivered to her left window. I wanted so badly to go ask her how did she get a US spec RHD Jeep but I didn't. The car was registered in South Carolina. Still a mystery to this day :)
I don't see anything extreme that couldn't have been repaired. I guess the RHD put it in the yard.