Junkyard Find: 1989 Toyota Cressida

You rarely see first-gen Cressidas, such as the junked ’80 I found last week these days; it seems that the third-gen (84-88) models make up the bulk of survivor Cressidas in North America. Fourth-gen examples— like this one I spotted in a Los Angeles self-service yard— are about as common as Crowns.

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Junkyard Find: 1989 Buick Reatta

My trip to California to judge the Skankaway Anti-Toe-Fungal 500 24 Hours of LeMons started with a jaunt to Los Angeles, where I saw this extremely rare Hyundai Scoupe in a junkyard. Not so rare as the Scoupe, yet more interesting from an automotive-history standpoint, was this Buick a few rows away.

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Junkyard Find: 1989 Toyota Land Cruiser

Well, here’s a truck you almost never see in junkyards. In Colorado, FJ60/62s have been considered sufficiently desirable that even beat ones mostly get snapped up at pre-Crusher auctions. Perhaps that’s all changing now, what with gas prices knocking down the prices of newer, more modern/less “truck-y” SUVs.

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Twin-Engined Toyota Racer Works Fine, Confounds Self-Proclaimed Experts

“How will you sync the engines?” whined the naysayers when they heard about the plan to weld an ’89 Corolla front half to an ’87 MR2 rear half. “How will you cool it? The handling will be terrible! It’ll never work!” If there’s one thing that 24 Hours of LeMons racing has taught the automotive world, it’s that the experts’ preconceptions can be thrown right out the window when it comes time to drop a cheap race car into the crucible of an all-weekend-long road race. For example, who would have imagined that Chevy small-block and Honda B engines would turn out to be among the most fragile in the crapcan endurance racing world? And who would have imagined that the DoubleSuck MR2olla would do so well at the notoriously car-killing Reno-Fernley Raceway?

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And the Winner Is…

Most of the time, the winner on laps of a 24 Hours of LeMons race takes the checkered flag with a nail-biting half-lap cushion, but that’s not how it went for the Goin’ Nuclear 1989 Honda Civic. This team built up a double-digit lead by Saturday afternoon, defended it all day Sunday, and ended the day with 14 more laps than the second-place car (an Accord).

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Orange County, 1989: The Dodge A100 That Started It All

There’s a reason that I spent decades thinking that, someday, I’d have my very own Dodge A100 project. That reason is this $50 A100, which survived a wild-eyed road trip through the heart of the civil wars in mid-80s El Salvador and Nicaragua. Going through my old 35mm negatives the other day, I found a few portraits with the A100 as backdrop.

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  • CanadaCraig You can just imagine how quickly the tires are going to wear out on a 5,800 lbs AWD 2024 Dodge Charger.
  • Luke42 I tried FSD for a month in December 2022 on my Model Y and wasn’t impressed.The building-blocks were amazing but sum of the all of those amazing parts was about as useful as Honda Sensing in terms of reducing the driver’s workload.I have a list of fixes I need to see in Autopilot before I blow another $200 renting FSD. But I will try it for free for a month.I would love it if FSD v12 lived up to the hype and my mind were changed. But I have no reason to believe I might be wrong at this point, based on the reviews I’ve read so far. [shrug]. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it once I get to test it.
  • FormerFF We bought three new and one used car last year, so we won't be visiting any showrooms this year unless a meteor hits one of them. Sorry to hear that Mini has terminated the manual transmission, a Mini could be a fun car to drive with a stick.It appears that 2025 is going to see a significant decrease in the number of models that can be had with a stick. The used car we bought is a Mk 7 GTI with a six speed manual, and my younger daughter and I are enjoying it quite a lot. We'll be hanging on to it for many years.
  • Oberkanone Where is the value here? Magna is assembling the vehicles. The IP is not novel. Just buy the IP at bankruptcy stage for next to nothing.
  • Jalop1991 what, no Turbo trim?