#Colorado

The Chrysler Corporation sold vans based on the B-Series platform from the 1971 through 2003 model years, giving them Dodge, Plymouth and Fargo badging along the way. Today's Junkyard Find is a first-generation B-van, found in a Colorado boneyard.

The "New Mini" first appeared in North American showrooms as a 2002 model, as part of the turn-of-the-century wave of retro-styled machinery that included the Volkswagen New Beetle, Chrysler PT Cruiser and Chevrolet HHR. It took about a decade for the 21st-century Mini to begin showing up in car graveyards in large numbers, and they remain easy to find today. Here's an '07 Cooper S model in a Colorado yard.

Honda beat everybody to the production gasoline-electric hybrid game in the United States, putting the Insight in showrooms in 1999. Toyota followed with the Prius a year later, but it took GM until 2006 to introduce its first true gasoline-electric hybrid here. That car was the 2007 Saturn Vue Green Line, and I managed to find one in a Denver-area car graveyard recently.

Of all the European-market new cars that flooded into the United States during the wild gray-market years of the early and middle 1980s, the Mercedes-Benz W126 S-Class appears to have been the most popular. Today's Junkyard Find is one of those cars, found in a self-service boneyard near Denver, Colorado.

The Saturn Division spent the first half of the 1990s printing money for The General with its no-haggle pricing policy and plastic-bodied cars that only rusted in areas you couldn't see easily, and all those cars were based on a single platform: the S Series. Today's Junkyard Find is an example of the sporty coupe version of the first-generation Saturn S, found in a Denver-area boneyard recently.

Mitsubishi began selling cars with its own branding in the United States in late 1982, introducing three car models and a pickup as 1983 models. We had an extensive range of Mitsubishi models to choose from for quite a while, including a credible luxury sedan known as the Diamante, but those days are long gone. Today's Junkyard Find is one of the very last Diamantes sold here, now residing in a Denver car graveyard.

There are certain categories of discarded vehicles that I search for before all others during my junkyard travels. French cars and extreme-high-mile machinery are on my list, of course, plus Sawzall roadsters/ pickups, art cars and oddball special editions. But my favorite Junkyard Finds are obscure examples of what-could-they-have-been-thinking badge engineering, and today's truck has lived atop my wish list for nearly 15 years.

Here's a car trivia question for you: what engine name went on to become the designation for a body style and then a car model name in its own right? The answer is, of course, Marauder.

Having a visible license plate is a big deal in most places, but the paint and coatings on the plate can wear and become hard to see over time. Here in Maine, it’s a common sight, as the road salt and sand can quickly shave off the more visible parts of a license plate. Colorado receives similar winter weather, and lawmakers in the state want to change the type of plates allowed to be more durable and visible over time.

When GM introduced the third-generation Chevrolet Camaro for the 1982 model year, it was 367 pounds lighter than its 1981 predecessor. The third-gen Camaro had gained most of that weight back by its final model year of 1992, but it still showed plenty of early-1980s-style swagger. Today's Junkyard Find is one of the very last third-gen Camaros ever built, found in a Denver car graveyard recently.

Even by the standards of the far-flung General Motors Empire, the J-Body was found everywhere, from the Vauxhall Cavaliers of Great Britain to the Isuzu Askas of Japan to the Daewoo Esperas of South Korea. In the United States of the 1980s, the Chevy Cavalier was the J-Body King, but its Pontiac-badged sibling, the Sunbird, was a not-so-distant second place in the J sales race. Today's Junkyard Find is a sporty Sunbird coupe, found in a yard just south of Denver, Colorado.

The Ford Escort began life in 1955, in Britain (just a year after World War II-era food rationing finally ended), as a cheapified version of the Ford Squire wagon. After the pinnacle of rear-wheel-drive Escort action on that side of the Atlantic, a front-wheel-drive version appeared over there; a not-so-closely-related North American cousin showed up as a 1981 model.

For a few years after the end of World War II, Detroit's automakers sold mildly facelifted prewar designs while they made the switch back to peacetime production. Chrysler managed the feat for the 1949 model year; we admired a Plymouth Special Deluxe sedan from that year in a Colorado car graveyard last summer, and today we're going to take a look at an example of one of the last of the stopgap postwar Chrysler products: this '48 Dodge in a yard just south of Denver.

In 1931, Buick introduced the world to its first big sedan with an eight-cylinder engine (which wasn't a V8 but did have overhead valves) driving the rear wheels. It seemed that such cars would always be available in Buick showrooms, but it turned out that the very last ones were the 1992-1996 Roadmasters. Here's one of those cars, found near Pikes Peak last winter.

Six thousand 1988 dollars were worth about $15,822 in today's money, according to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, just below the MSRP of the cheapest new car available here now. In 1988, American car shoppers could choose among a dozen new cars priced below that figure. Today's Junkyard Find is a rare example of Mazda's entry in the sub-six-grand field for '88, found in a self-service yard in northeastern Colorado.