#SajeevsBitterTears

When you write about cars for a living, you can get carefully prepared vehicles dropped off at your door (or at airports) for you to experience and then review. Sometimes you even get the experience of wrecking them! The very first press car I ever received was a red 2008 Mercury Sable, so let's take a look at the same kind of car at the end of its 16-year career.

The original Ford Taurus first appeared as a 1986 model, going through three generations and nearly 10 million sales (counting the Mercury Sable) before getting the axe in October of 2006. That made 2007 the final model year for the "real" Taurus, and I've found one of these rare cars in a New Orleans self-service junkyard.

The 1960 model year saw a trio of brand-new compact Detroit cars ( the Corvair, Valiant and Falcon) appear to do battle with increasingly popular small imports. Sales were strong, and the Detroit Big Three plus the Kenosha One got busy preparing midsize cars to slide between the compacts and the full- sizers. Ford's entry was the Fairlane, which debuted as a 1962 model. Here's one of those first-generation Fairlanes, found in a self-service boneyard just south of Denver, Colorado.

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.

1979 was the final model year for genuinely enormous Lincoln sedans, with the mighty Continental moving to the Panther platform for 1980. Today's Junkyard Find, found in a Colorado car graveyard recently, is one of those era-ending Continentals.

Ford built cars on the Fox platform from 1977 through 1993 (or 2004, if you consider the Fox-derived SN95 Mustang to be a true Fox), and I've done my best to document junkyard examples of every Fox Ford model ever built. One Fox that avoided boneyard discovery for many years was the wagon version of the 1983-1986 LTD, but my searching paid off when I found this very rough '85 in a San Francisco Bay Area knacker's yard.

Of all the Mercury models sold since the marque was born in the 1939 model year, the Cougar must have been the most varied. From the first Mustang sibling in 1967 and into our current century, the Cougar name went on small sporty coupes, white-powder-sprinkled personal luxury boats, midsize sedans, big sedans, station wagons, and various thinly-disguised Continental/Thunderbird copies. The very last Cougar generation was a sport compact coupe with European ancestry, and that's what we've got for today's Junkyard Find.

Now they’ve binned everything that is not an SUV, Lincoln is free to spend its allowance as it sees fit on new clothes and tech for its crossover lineup. To be fair, that style of vehicle is the beyond-dominant preference of most shoppers in the Lincoln demographic – and the brand would be ill-advised to walk away from those profits. Doesn’t make us pine any less for a Continental with coach doors.