Subaru began selling four-wheel-drive-equipped Leone station wagons in the United States as 1975 models, and each passing year after that saw more American car shoppers deciding that they wanted cars—not trucks, cars—with power going to all four wheels. Toyota got into that game with the Tercel 4WD wagon, sold here for the 1983 through 1988 model years, and I’ve found one of those cars in its final parking space in Denver.

The very affordable Tercel first went on sale in the United States as a 1980 model, badged as the Corolla Tercel at first (in order to take advantage of the name recognition for the unrelated Corolla, which had been a strong seller since its American debut in 1966).

The original Tercel had an interesting powertrain layout, with a longitudinally-mounted engine driving the front wheels via a V-drive-style transmission that sent power to a differential assembly mounted below the engine. This resulted in an awkward-looking high hood but also meant that sending power to a rear drive axle was just a matter of adding a rear-facing output shaft to the transmission.

Making a four-wheel-drive Tercel wasn’t difficult with that rig plus a few off-the-shelf parts, and Toyota decided to add a wagon version of the Tercel at the same time. This was the Sprinter Carib, which debuted in Japan as a 1982 model. The Tercel 4WD Wagon (as it was known in North America) hit American Toyota showrooms as a 1983 model.

A front-wheel-drive version of the Tercel Wagon was also available in the United States, though not in Japan; most of the Tercel Wagons I find during my junkyard travels are four-wheel-drive versions.

This car has four-wheel-drive, not all-wheel-drive (as we understand the terms today), which means that the driver had to manually select front-wheel-drive for use on dry pavement. Failure to do so would result in damage to the tires or worse. American Motors began selling the all-wheel-drive Eagle as a 1980 model, with Audi following a year later with its Quattro AWD system, while Toyota didn’t begin selling true AWD cars in the United States until its All-Trac system debuted in the 1988 model year.

The Tercel 4WD Wagon sold very well in snowy regions of North America, despite strong competition from Subaru as well as from the 4WD-equipped wagons offered by Honda, Nissan, and Mitsubishi.

This one is a top-of-the-Tercel-range SR5 model with just about every possible option. While the base 1986 Tercel FWD hatchback started at a miserly $5448 ($15,586 in today’s dollars), the MSRP for a 1986 Tercel SR5 4WD wagon was $8898 ($25,456 after inflation).

One of the coolest features of the SR5 version of the ’86 Tercel 4WD Wagon was the six-speed manual transmission, with its “Extra Low” gear. If you’re a Tercel 4WD Wagon enthusiast (many are), this is the transmission you want for your car!

The SR5’s plaid seat upholstery looked great, as an added bonus.

These cars were reasonably capable off-road, though the lack of power made them quite slow on any surface. This is a 1.5-liter 3A-C SOHC straight-four, rated at 62 horsepower and 76 pound-feet (probably more like 55 horsepower at Denver’s elevation).

The curb weight of this car was a wispy 2290 pounds and so it wasn’t nearly as pokey as, say, a Rabbit Diesel, but I’ve owned several 1983-1988 Tercel Wagons and I can say from personal experience that they require a great deal of patience on freeway on-ramps.

I can also say from experience that the Tercel Wagon obliterates every one of its anywhere-near-similarly-priced competitors in the reliability and build-quality departments. This one made it to a pretty good 232,503 miles during its career, and I’ve found a junkyard ’88 with well over 400,000 miles on its odometer.

The air conditioning added $655 to the price tag, or $1874 in today’s dollars. This one has an aftermarket radio, but SR5 4WD Wagon buyers for 1986 got a pretty decent AM/FM radio with four speakers as standard equipment. If you wanted to play cassettes, that was $186 more ($532 now).

The Tercel went to a third generation during the 1988 model year (both the second- and third-generation Tercels were sold in the United States as 1988 models), becoming a cousin of the Japanese-market Starlet and getting an ordinary engine orientation in the process. The 4WD Wagon went away, to be replaced by the Corolla All-Trac Wagon. The 1996 Tercel ended up being the last new car available in the United States with a four-speed manual transmission, by the way.

These cars make fun projects today, though finding rust-free examples can be a challenge.

***

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In Colorado, where I live, four-wheel-drive Subarus have been beloved ever since the first 4WD Leone-based models appeared in showrooms in the mid-’70s. Because of their popularity in the Centennial State for nearly 50 years, the car graveyards along the I-25 corridor amount to museums of the history of the Pleiades-badged brand in America. Today we’ll take a look at an absolutely loaded Subaru wagon, found in a boneyard just outside of Denver.

When we talk about U.S.-market Subarus of the 1970s and 1980s, we need to first discuss the way that Fuji Heavy Industries named their cars on this side of the Pacific. The Leone, as it was known in Pacific markets, debuted in the United States as a 1972 model, but that name was never used here. At first, they were designated by their engine displacements, but soon each model was pitched as, simply, “the Subaru” with the trim levels (DL and GL were the best-known) used as de facto model names. The exception to this system was the Brat pickup, which first showed up as a 1978 model. Things in the American Subaru naming world became even more confusing when the non-Leone-derived XT appeared as a 1985 model followed by the Justy two years later, and the Leone finally became the Loyale here for its final years (1990-1994).

The Leone began its American career as a seriously cheap economy car, mocked in popular culture for its small size (but still getting a shout-out from Debbie Harry). Sponsorship of the U.S. Olympic Ski Team and gradual addition of size and features allowed Subaru to sell the higher-end Leone models for decent money as the 1980s went on.

In 1987, the absolute cheapest member of the Leone family in the United States was the base front-wheel-drive three-door-hatchback, coming in at an MSRP of $5857 (about $16,345 in 2024 dollars). Known to Subaru dealers as the STD, it was disappointingly never badged as such.

At the very top of the 1987 U.S.-market Leone ziggurat stood today’s Final Parking Space subject: the GL-10 Turbo 4WD Wagon. Its price started at an impressive $14,688, which comes to a cool $40,990 after inflation. A naturally-aspirated 1987 GL 4WD Wagon could be had for $10,767 ($30,047 in today’s money). In fact, the only way to spend more on a new 1987 Subaru (before options) was to forget about the Leone and buy an XT GL-10 Turbo 4WD at $15,648 ($43,669 now).

There weren’t many options you’d need on the feature-stuffed GL-10, but this car’s original buyer decided it was worth paying an additional $955 ($2665 in today’s bucks) for the automatic transmission. That pushed its out-the-door cost to within spitting distance of the price of admission for a new Volkswagen Quantum Syncro Wagon and its $17,320 ($48,335 in 2024) price.

Subaru was an early adopter of turbocharging for U.S.-market cars, with the first turbocharged Leone coupes and wagons appearing here in 1983. This car has a 1.8-liter SOHC boxer-four rated at 115 horsepower and 134 pound-feet, pretty good power in its time for a vehicle that scaled in at just 2,530 pounds (that’s about 700 fewer pounds than a new Impreza hatchback, to give you a sense of how much bulkier the current crop of new “small” cars is).

Subaru was just in the process of introducing a true all-wheel-drive system as we understand the term today in its U.S.-market vehicles when this car was built, and both 4WD and AWD systems were installed in Subarus sold here from the 1987 through 1994 model years. (Beginning with the 1996 model year, all new Subarus sold in the United States were equipped with AWD.) Subaru fudged the definition on its badging for a while by using a character that could be read as either a 4 or an A, as seen in the photo above.

I’ve documented a discarded 1987 GL-10 Turbo 4WD Coupe that had genuine AWD (called “full-time four-wheel-drive” by Subaru and some other manufacturers at the time), and it had prominent “FULL-TIME 4WD” badging and a differential-lock switch. This car just has the 4WD switch on the gearshift lever, like earlier 4WD Subarus with automatics, so I am reasonably sure that it has a 4WD system that requires the driver to switch to front-wheel-drive on dry pavement in order to avoid damage to tires or worse. But even as the current owner of two Subarus and a longtime chronicler of junked Fuji Heavy Equipment hardware, I cannot say for certain about the weird 1987 model year. Please help us out in the comments if you know for sure!

This car has the sort of science-fiction-grade digital dash that was so popular among manufacturers (particularly Japanese ones) during the middle 1980s.

It also has what a 1987 car shopper would have considered a serious factory audio system, with cassette track detection and a trip computer thrown in for good measure. This stuff was standard on the GL-10 that year, and you needed that righteous radio to fully appreciate the popular music of the time.

The odometer shows just over 120,000 miles, and the interior wasn’t too thrashed, so why was one of the coolest Subaru wagons of the 1980s residing in this place? First of all, there’s a glut of project Leones available in Colorado’s Front Range at any given moment. Second, all of the most devoted enthusiasts of these cars in this region already have hoards stables of a dozen with no space for more; I let my many friends who love these cars know about this one and they plucked at least a few parts from it before it got crushed (sorry, I shot these photos last summer and this car has already had its date with the crusher).

So, if you’re a vintage Subaru aficionado living where the Rust Monster stands 100 feet tall, head to the region between Cheyenne and Colorado Springs and find yourself a project Leone to bring home. We’ve got plenty here!

***

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Pontiac went from being the affordable-yet-stodgy GM division to the youth-centric division with brilliant marketing and engineering under John Z. DeLorean during the 1960s, and enough of that spirit survived into the 1980s to allow for the development of a radical, mid-engined Pontiac two-seater. That car was the Fiero, and I’ve found this loaded ’85 GT in a self-service boneyard just south of Denver.

The Fiero debuted as a 1984 model, the same year as the groundbreaking C4 Corvette. I was in my senior year of high school at the time, and I don’t recall nearly as much excitement among my peers over Pontiac’s new two-seater as for the first Corvette to handle like a true sports car.

Pontiac was denied a two-seat sports car in the 1960s, though Pontiac’s XP-833 Banshee prototype went on to contribute design elements to the C3 Corvette and the Opel GT. By the late 1970s, though, times seemed right for a lightweight, mid-engined sports car from Pontiac that could help GM meet Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards.

During a very lengthy and not-so-well-funded development period, the Fiero ended up being based on a unibody spaceframe onto which plastic body panels were bolted. This resulted in a very sturdy structure and a rustproof body, but the combination weighed hundreds of pounds more than the designers would have preferred.

There was no way GM was going to kick loose the funds to develop a new engine just for one low-volume affordable car, and the same ended up being true for the transaxle and suspension.

For its debut year, the only engine available in the Fiero was the 2.5-liter Iron Duke pushrod straight-four, known as the Tech IV when equipped with throttle-body fuel injection (as was the case with the Fiero). It was cheap to build—thanks to sharing much tooling with the Pontiac 301 V-8—and reliable, but it didn’t like to spin and it generated just 92 horsepower and 132 pound-feet of torque. Not exactly ideal for a sporty car, especially one that had to compete against two-seat competition that included the Honda Civic CRX, Toyota MR2, and Ford EXP/Mercury LN7.

For 1985, a 2.8-liter pushrod V-6 became available in the Fiero. It was rated at 130 horsepower and 160 pound-feet, and it resulted in a respectably quick car. This is a GT (or a regular Fiero with GT parts swapped in; the build tag was scraped off), so it came with the V-6 as standard equipment.

The reason that the Tech IV and 2.8 V-6 were the only two Fiero engine choices is a simple one: the transaxle and rear suspension in the Fiero were borrowed from the front of the GM X-body, best known as the platform beneath the Chevrolet Citation, and those are the engines used in the X family. The front suspension for the 1984–87 Fiero came from the Chevrolet Chevette, because it was cheap and available.

For the 1988 model year, the Fiero got a bespoke new suspension that ditched the Citation and Chevette stuff and improved the car’s handling. The change didn’t help sales much, as the American car-buying public remembered the widely publicized engine fires and recalls of the 1984 and 1985 cars. 1988 was the final year for the Fiero.

This one is loaded with expensive options, including the $475 three-speed automatic transmission ($1389 in 2024 dollars) and the $750 air conditioning ($2193 after inflation). The MSRP for the 1985 Fiero GT was $11,795, or $34,481 in today’s money; the entry-level 1985 Fiero started at $8495 ($24,834 now).

The Fiero wasn’t what you’d call a success story for GM, but the good news today is that the Fiero has long been an affordable and versatile enthusiast machine. In my role as wise and dignified Chief Justice of the 24 Hours of Lemons Supreme Court, I’ve seen plenty of Fieros on road-race courses and they can be fast if set up properly and well-driven. In fact, 1984–87 models with ordinary 2.8s get around the track just as well as the 1988s, and they’re reliable once you sort out the X-body axle/hub bugs.

The removable plastic body panels mean that you can convert a Fiero into a “Fierrari” or a “Fieroborghini” if you so choose, and an entire universe of GM engines can be swapped in without too much difficulty.

***

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Welcome back to Final Parking Space, where discarded vehicles tell us their stories of automotive history. A couple of months back, we took a look at a well-traveled Göteborg machine in a California boneyard, and today we’ll be admiring another 1980s Swede. This car was born in Trollhättan, just north of Volvo HQ: a 1986 Saab 900 S four-door, found in a Denver-self-service yard.

The wild Saab 900 Turbo gets most of the attention nowadays, and I’ve found plenty of those during my junkyard travels, but the 16-valve naturally-aspirated versions were respectably quick and much more affordable. In 1986, the 900 S got this 2.0-liter DOHC engine, rated at 125 horsepower and 123 pound-feet. That’s quite a bit less than the 160 horsepower and 188 pound-feet from the turbocharged version that year, but beats the 110 horses and 119 pound-feet from the base SOHC-equipped 900 for ’86.

This engine family was born back in the middle 1960s, when Saab hired Triumph to develop the engine to be used in the Saab 99. The Triumph Slant-Four went on to power Triumph models beginning with the 1972 Dolomite and continued under Triumph bonnets through the final TR7s in 1981. The Saab and Triumph versions diverged significantly over the years, but the soundness of the original design shows in the fact that Saabs were powered by descendants of the original Slant-Four all the way through 2010.

All 1986 Saabs sold in the United States had a five-speed manual transmission as base equipment, and that’s what this car has. An automatic transmission was a $400 option ($1126 in 2024 dollars), but I have yet to find a retired 900 with two pedals. (Amazingly, I have documented slushbox-equipped examples of the Porsche 944 and Fiat 124 Sport Spider.)

The front-wheel-drive 900 performed very well on snow and ice and thus proved quite popular in the Mountain West. This car appears to have begun its career in Wyoming, where even frost-hardened Swedes might find the winter driving a challenge.

A previous owner of this car seems to have attended the University of Wyoming College of Law. A fuel-efficient, snow-capable Saab 900 would have been a sensible vehicle for a lawyer visiting clients scattered around the vast distances and harsh climate of the Equality State.

The MSRP for the 1986 Saab 900 S four-door sedan was $16,495, or about $46,417 after inflation. That compared favorably with the $20,055 BMW 325 four-door (which had four fewer horsepower and 47 more pound-feet than the Saab).

This car had just over 100,000 miles on the odometer at the end. That VDO clock/tachometer assembly was shared with some Mercedes-Benz models of the same era, though with different colors.

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General Motors was one of the most innovative vehicle manufacturers in the world for many decades, giving us the first genuinely successful automatic transmission, powerful and cheap V-8 engines for the masses, leading-edge touchscreen interfaces, head-up displays, and the first production overhead-cam engine with a timing belt. With all that, though, European manufacturers became better-known for their technologically advanced and futuristically styled machinery by the 1980s, and GM needed to catch up. What better way than by designing a gorgeous two-seater to be hand-built by the Buick Division’s most experienced workers? This was the Buick Reatta. I found this well-preserved example in a Northern California car graveyard.

The Buick Division had to work with the platforms it had on hand for the Reatta, and its front-wheel-drive chassis was based on one borrowed from the Buick Riviera/Cadillac Eldorado/Oldsmobile Toronado and then shortened a bit.

The 1988 and 1989 Reattas came with the radical Electronic Control Center touchscreen interface as standard equipment. This system was based on cathode-ray-tube hardware sourced from an ATM manufacturer and required 120VAC power behind the dash. It was decades ahead of its time.

Unfortunately, the traditional Buick-buying demographic at the time wasn’t very enthusiastic about electronic gadgets or two-seaters in general. Meanwhile, prospective buyers of BMWs, Audis, and Mercedes-Benzes who might have been lured into Reatta purchases were put off by the pushrod Buick V-6 under the Reatta’s hood; while a reliable and reasonably powerful engine, its ancestry stretched back to the 1961 Buick 215 V-8 and it was decidedly less sophisticated than the double-overhead-cam engines coming from Europe at the time.

The only transmission available in the Reatta was a four-speed automatic, which probably wasn’t as much of a sales limitation as the old-timey engine.

Still, it was a beautiful and luxurious car and deserved a better sales fate than what it got. This one looks to have been in good shape when it ended up in its Final Parking Space.

Let’s hope that local Reatta fans harvested all its good parts before it went to the crusher.

***

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When you spend enough time crawling around in car graveyards, as I do, you learn that plenty of seemingly restorable examples of much-sought-after vehicles end up getting discarded and crushed. The Volkswagen Transporter is one of the most vivid examples of this; enthusiasts love them passionately, resale values keep on climbing… and yet here’s another solid Transporter, found in a Denver-area self-service yard. What gives?

This one is a Vanagon, the name Volkswagen used for the third-generation (known as the T3) Transporter in North America. The Vanagon first went on sale here as a 1980 model, replacing the beloved T2.

Volkswagen began selling air-cooled Transporter vans and pickups in the United States in the early 1950s, stubbornly referring to the passenger-van version as a station wagon for many years (to be fair, the Detroit manufacturers took the same approach when marketing their small passenger vans). The first-generation, T1 Transporters were sold in the United States through the 1967 model year, after which the T2 took over here for the 1968 through 1979 model years.

The Vanagon still had its engine in the back, but it was bigger and wore more angular styling than its predecessors. The 1980–82 models were powered by air-cooled engines, just as their 1938 kDf-Wagen ancestor had done, but water-cooled engines began showing up in Vanagons during 1983. This van has a radiator in the front, so it must be an ’83-up Wasserboxer, nein?

Well, VW’s build tag shows a March 1981 date of manufacture, so this van’s (presumable) final owner must have become weary of the original air-cooled mill overheating in Colorado’s hot, thin air and decided to upgrade to a newer, water-cooled rig. The VIN shows that it started out with gasoline power, so at least its original owner didn’t have to tolerate Malaise-Era VW Diesel Misery (actually, the dangerously slow 48-horse Vanagon Diesel was available in the United States for just the 1982 and 1983 model years).

Was the swap ever completed? Engine parts, including a pair of Wasserboxer cylinder heads, are scattered around the rear cargo area but the engine case is missing. Either the project faltered and never drove with water coursing through its veins or the water-cooled engine blew up and didn’t get repaired.

This van isn’t at all rusty and the interior looks to have been decent enough when it arrived here, so how did it meet this fate?

First of all, Front Range Colorado (the part of the state just to the east of the Rocky Mountains) is isolated from America’s other major population centers by the vast distances of the American West. That’s great for automotive enthusiasts who live here (as I do), because the dry climate discourages corrosion and great project vehicles are easy to find at good prices. However, it’s a grueling two- or three-day tow from here to the big cities of the Midwest, and it’s an even more grueling two- or three-day tow over two triple-digit-elevation mountain ranges to the big cities of the West Coast.

A 1961 Transporter in this shape would find an out-of-state rescuer for sure, even if no local air-cooled VW enthusiast had space for it (most of us have all the projects we can handle and then some), but that proved not to be the case for a Transporter two decades newer. Solid Vanagons go to the crusher here on a regular basis, as I’ve shown in the past (and if you think Vanagon Westfalias are immune from the cold steel jaws of the Colorado Crusher, think again).

How about T2 Transporters in Colorado junkyards? They’re a bit harder to find in the boneyards here, but they do show up now and again. I documented a ’78 with the ultra-rare automatic transmission just last summer, plus a ’71 Kombi and a beige-over-brown ’78 with period-correct pinstriping in recent years.

The Vanagon was sold in the United States through the 1991 model year, with the very last T3 Transporters rolling off the assembly line in South Africa in 2002. Volkswagen of America brought over the T4 Transporter as the EuroVan for the 1993 through 2003 model years, but sales numbers here never approached those of the T1-T3 vans. After that, VWoA took a shot at selling Chrysler-built minivans with Routan badges here for the 2009–14 period, with results about as grim as everyone predicted. Now the Volkswagen Van has returned to the United States, powered by electrons and showing design influences from three-quarters of a century of Transporters.

***

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The Bayerische Motoren Werke company has been building the 3 Series since the E21 was revealed to the world in 1975. Since that time, we’ve seen six more generations of the 3 Series, and the E21’s immediate successor stands as perhaps the most beloved and iconic BMW ever built. That car is the E30, sold in the United States from the 1984 through the 1991 model years. For today’s Final Parking Space, we have an early E30 with six-cylinder engine and manual transmission, found recently in a Denver-area boneyard.

The first E30 model to be sold in North America was the 318i, equipped with the same four-cylinder engine as its 320i predecessor. It arrived on our shores during the later months of 1983 and thus shared showroom space with the 320i for a while. The first six-cylinder E30 sold here was the 325e; this one rolled off the assembly line in April of 1984.

If this is the original engine—Colorado E30 owners tend to be a swap-crazed bunch, so that’s not certain—it’s a 2.7-liter SOHC unit rated at 121 horsepower and 170 pound-feet. The “e” in the car’s designation stands for the Greek letter η (Eta), used by engineers as the symbol to represent efficiency. BMW designed this engine to make plenty of torque, as a way to boost fuel economy. (The gas lines of the 1979 Oil Crisis were still painfully recent memories at the time.)

The 325e was respectably quick off the line thanks to all that torque, but E30 enthusiasts tend to prefer the greater horsepower output of the non-Eta straight-six engines, which first appeared in U.S.-market E30s under the hoods of the 1987 325i and 325iS. As a wise and fair official with the 24 Hours of Lemons race series since 2008, I’ve seen hundreds of E30s going all-out on road courses around the country and can say that the 325e can keep up with the 325i just fine in the real world, though both types frequently suffer from maddening electrical-system problems, particularly those involving engine computers, on the race track.

A dismaying number of E30s were sold in the United States with the optional automatic transmission, which would have been a four-speed slushbox in an ’84 325e, but this car has the base five-speed manual. By the time you read this, the entire powertrain will likely have been yanked from this car by local BMW enthusiasts, who circle Front Range junkyards like vultures, hungry for E30 parts.

There’s a lot of other good stuff here for the junkyard shopper, including wheels, glass, trim, door panels, and body parts. Contrary to the popular belief that even the roughest E30s are worth ten grand, cheap examples are still out there and some still show up at self-service car graveyards. True, discarded E30s are much less commonplace than they were a decade ago (these days, junkyard E46s are a dime-a-dozen and even E36s are still fairly easy to find at your local Ewe Pullet–type establishment), but I still find good ones during my junkyard travels.

The MSRP for this car was $24,565, or about $74,021 in 2023 dollars. If that seems steep, the four-banger 1984 318i listed at just $16,430 ($49,508 in today’s money) and it offered nimbler handling due to being nearly 300 pounds lighter. Meanwhile, Mercedes-Benz would sell you a new 190E 2.3 with five-on-the-floor and nearly as much power as the 325e for $22,850 ($68,853 now), while brave American car shoppers could buy a new 1984 Alfa Romeo GTV-6 coupe with a screaming 154-horse V-6 for only $19,000 ($57,252 today).

Air conditioning and a trip computer were standard equipment in the 1984 318i and 325e, along with an AM/FM/cassette radio, which has been replaced by a more modern aftermarket Sony unit.

What’s the lesson here? Use genuine BMW parts and don’t give up on your E30 dreams if you’ve always wanted one, because the price of admission may not be as high as you think.

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Please welcome our newest columnist (and junkyard hunter extraordinaire), the great Murilee Martin. He has been writing about cars since starting as a catalog copywriter at Year One in 1995. He became a contributor for Jalopnik in 2007 and has since written for Autoweek, Motor Authority, The Truth About Cars, Autoblog, Car and Driver and others. Murilee has loved going to junkyards since he got his first hooptie car, a $50 Toyota Corona sedan, and he enjoys speculating on the lives led by junkyard vehicles and their owners. His personal fleet at present includes a 1941 Plymouth hill-climb race car, a chopped-and-shaved 1969 Toyota Corona lowrider, a 1996 Subaru Sambar kei van, a 1997 Lexus LS400 Coach Edition, and a 1981 Honda Super Cub. -EW

With the ever-increasing sales success of the Volkswagen Beetle and other small imported cars in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s, Ford and General Motors had the deep pockets to develop their own homegrown competitors from scratch: the Pinto and the Vega. Chrysler couldn’t afford to take that route, instead choosing to import and rebadge two cars from its European operations (the Simca 1204 aka Simca 1100 and the Plymouth Cricket aka Hillman Avenger) and one from a Japanese manufacturer (the Dodge Colt aka Mitsubishi Colt Galant). The Colt sold well here, but Chrysler still needed to produce an American-built subcompact designed for our roads. That car ended up being the Dodge Omni and its Plymouth Horizon twin, and I’ve found a well-preserved example of the latter in the same Colorado car graveyard that recently gave us the 1963 Chrysler Newport as the debut of the Final Parking Space series.

Unlike the Pinto and Vega, the Omnirizon (as these cars are commonly known by their aficionados) began life as a European design, with development taking place at Chrysler Europe’s operations in the United Kingdom and France. As was the case with the later front-wheel-drive Ford Escort, the European-market versions differed substantially from their American counterparts while maintaining a strong family resemblance.

So, just as owners of Chrysler/Talbot/Simca Horizons are justified in thinking of their cars as patriotic red-white–and-blue British or French machines, American Omnirizon owners have just as much right to consider their cars genuine red-white-and-blue American machines. Omnirizon production began in Illinois (at Chrysler’s Belvidere Assembly) in December of 1977, with the first cars sold as 1978 models.

Omnirizon sales started out strong, helped along by the 1979 Iranian Revolution and resulting oil shortage, and this simple and affordable car remained in production all the way through the 1990 model year. The Omnirizon was considered something of an obsolete 1970s relic by the late 1980s, but it was so cheap to build that it was able to compete on price with the most affordable imports.

The 1988 Omnrizon had an MSRP of just $5995, which comes to about $15,910 in 2023 dollars. The America trim level began life as the designation for the very cheapest Omnirizons, but by 1988 all of them were Americas. Not many new U.S.-market 1988 cars could undercut that sticker price, though some managed the feat.

The wretched Yugo GV had a hilarious price tag of $4199 ($11,144 today) that year, though the $5295 ($14,052 now) Hyundai Excel was the greater threat to Omnirizon sales. Just squeezing under the Omnirizon’s price (and available in the same dealerships) was the $5899 ($15,655 after inflation) Dodge/Plymouth Colt;  the Toyota Tercel EZ, Ford Festiva and Volkswagen Fox also came with MSRPs that just barely undercut that of the 1988 Omnirizon.

The Omirizon was available only as a five-door hatchback, but its platform begat many other Dodge and Plymouth models sold in North America. These include the 1982-1987 Dodge Charger and the Plymouth Scamp/Dodge Rampage pickups.

This one is an Omnirizon in the literal sense, because it has parts from many Omnis and Horizons. There are both Omni and Horizon badges to be found and the emissions sticker stuck on the underside of the hood comes from a 1989 Omni; the build tag says it’s a 1988 Horizon and therefore that’s what we’re calling it. I’ve found quite a few Omnirizons in Denver-area junkyards in recent years, sometimes in groups of a half-dozen at a time, so I think there must be a local collector unloading a hoard of parts cars.

However, this one has a red tag that suggests it was towed for illegal parking. A search of its VIN shows that it was purchased (presumably by Colorado Auto & Parts) at a nearby auction for $250.

Chrysler bolted a bewildering variety of engines in the American-market Omnirizon over the years, with suppliers including Simca, Volkswagen, and Peugeot. Starting with the 1987 model year, however, every example received the Chrysler 2.2-liter straight-four under its hood. This one is a fuel-injected version rated at 96 horsepower and 122 pound-feet.

For 1988, transmission choices were limited to a five-speed manual and three-speed automatic. This car has the automatic, which added a whopping $1179 ($3,129 after inflation) to the cost.

It doesn’t have the $694 ($1842 now) air conditioner, but it was purchased with the optional $254 ($674 today) AM/FM/cassette radio.

I have local friends who are restoring a 1990 Omni for their 16-year-old (the ’90 came with a driver’s-side airbag, amazingly), and I called them the moment I first laid eyes on this car because the 1988-1990 models are nearly impossible to find in the boneyards nowadays. They grabbed a treasure trove of useful parts that same day and have since incorporated them into their project. It’s good to know that some of this piece of American automotive history will live on in one of its street-driven brethren.

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Please welcome our newest columnist (and junkyard hunter extraordinaire), the great Murilee Martin. He has been writing about cars since starting as a catalog copywriter at Year One in 1995. He became a contributor for Jalopnik in 2007 and has since written for Autoweek, Motor Authority, The Truth About Cars, Autoblog, Car and Driver and others. Murilee has loved going to junkyards since he got his first hooptie car, a $50 Toyota Corona sedan, and he enjoys speculating on the lives led by junkyard vehicles and their owners. His personal fleet at present includes a 1941 Plymouth hill-climb race car, a chopped-and-shaved 1969 Toyota Corona lowrider, a 1996 Subaru Sambar kei van, a 1997 Lexus LS400 Coach Edition and a 1981 Honda Super Cub. -EW

Now that I’ve documented more than 2600 vehicles in car graveyards around the country, I know which discarded cars to check for odometers showing intergalactic final readings: Mercedes-Benz diesels, 1980s Honda Accords and brick-shaped Volvos. Today’s Final Parking Space machine is one of the latter type: a sensible Swedish sedan that traveled the equivalent of 15.7 trips around Earth’s equator during its career.

Because some Volvo experts might be annoyed that I’m not using the same designation that Volvo assigned this car when it was new, please be aware that the true model name of this car was “DL Sedan.” That’s because United States-market members of the Volvo 200 Series cars (which included the six-cylinder 260s as well as four-cylinder 240s) were just badged as their trim levels here for the 1980 through 1985 model years; after that, they were badged with “240” followed by the trim level. Because it’s helpful to have a model name that indicates both the number of doors and the number of cylinders, most people today use the original naming system with the middle digit indicating number of engine cylinders and the third digit representing the number of doors.

Now, let’s talk about odometers! Very few vehicle manufacturers used six-digit odometers on their U.S.-market products prior to the middle 1980s, and most Detroit manufacturers kept five-digit units in their vehicles until fairly deep into the 1990s (with notable exceptions). Mercedes-Benz and Volvo, however, felt sufficiently optimistic about the longevity of their cars to go to six-digit odometers during the 1960s, while Toyota and Honda took the jump in the early 1980s. That means that I’m certain to have walked right by many American-made cars and trucks (especially trucks) in junkyards that had, say, 492,533 miles rather than the 92,533 miles displayed on their odometers. Keep that in mind before you blow a brain gasket over the shortage of Detroit Iron in the Murilee Martin Junkyard Odometer Standings.

So, those standings as of the time of this writing, after nearly 17 years of writing about junkyard cars:

1. 1990 Volvo 240 DL, 631,999 miles
2. 1988 Honda Accord LXi, 626,476 miles
3. 1987 Mercedes-Benz 190E, 601,173 miles
4. 1996 Toyota Camry Wagon, 583,624 miles
5. 1981 Mercedes-Benz 300SD, 572,139 miles
6. 1985 Mercedes-Benz 300SD, 525,971 miles
7. 1988 Honda Accord DX, 513,519 miles
8. 1990 Volvo 740 Turbo Wagon, 493,549 miles
9. 1990 Nissan Sentra, 440,299 miles
10. 1991 Honda Accord, 435,417 miles

As you can see, today’s Volvo doesn’t come close to reaching the Top Ten (it’s 23rd overall at the moment, between a 393K-mile Mazda RX-7 and a 389K-mile Toyota Avalon), but some consolation for fans of Swedish steel must come from the fact that a 244 is the current Numero Uno. Today’s FPS entry is the fourth-best-traveled Volvo I’ve found in a wrecking yard, if you must know.

I couldn’t decipher this car’s odometer when I first found it, however, because there was an object blocking most of the digits. I could see it began with 3, but I had to know the true figure.

I never visit a junkyard without my trusty lightweight toolkit, naturally, so I got to work removing and disassembling this car’s instrument cluster (don’t worry, I put it back together again in case a later junkyard shopper wanted to buy it).

It turned out that a piece of the label affixed by VDO during the manufacture of the cluster (in November of 1984) had suffered adhesive failure and slipped in front of the odometer. This car was in a San Francisco Bay Area yard, so we can assume that California’s hot, dry summer weather was out of spec for the label glue VDO used.

The 240 is the most iconic and best-known Volvo, period, and it was available in the United States from the 1975 through 1993 model years. It proved so popular that it stayed in production long past its intended successor, the 740.

The 240’s ancestry goes much further back than 1975, though. From the A-pillar rearward, it’s essentially a Volvo 140, a 1960s design that itself carries some DNA from the 1944 Volvo PV444. The 240 uses a suspension design very similar to that of Ford’s Fox-body Mustang and is about the same size and weight, so its performance is notably Fox-like when given a Ford Windsor V-8 swap (as I’ve done).

Why do so many Volvo 240s seem to hold together so well? Much of the credit goes to good design, solid build quality and Volvo’s “don’t change what works” philosophy of the 1940s-1980s. Equal credit should go to Volvo 240 owners, many of whom were (and are) willing to keep their beloved cars in daily service for 30+ years. I still find a dozen or so 240s in Colorado and California car graveyards every year.

While the first-year 240 came with a pushrod engine right out of the 140 and the 262/264 got the PRV V-6, the overwhelming majority of 200-Series Volvos got a single-overhead-cam straight-four, in either naturally-aspirated or turbocharged form (there were Volkswagen-sourced diesel engines as well, though very few 240s so equipped were sold on this side of the Atlantic). This car has a 2.3-liter rated at 114 horsepower and 136 pound-feet. A turbocharged version was available with 162 horses and 175 pound-feet for 1985.

This car is a base-trim-level sedan (the 242 two-door had been discontinued the year before) with automatic transmission, so its MSRP was $13,335 (about $38,811 in 2023 dollars). Since it lasted for more than three times as many miles as most other mid-1980s cars, we can say that was money well spent.

Why did it end up here? The hood damage appears to have been inflicted by Pick-n-Pull employees bypassing a sticky hood latch in the quickest way possible, and the interior appears to have been in decent condition when the car entered the junkyard ecosystem. Perhaps its final owner traded it in on a new car and its scary odometer reading rendered it unsalable, or maybe it developed a problem too expensive for even a Volvo devotee to pay.

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The post Final Parking Space: 1985 Volvo 244 with nearly 400K miles appeared first on Hagerty Media.