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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Most of the 20th-century Italian cars you’ll find in North American car graveyards today will be Fiat 124 Sport Spiders and X1/9s, with the occasional Alfa Romeo 164 thrown in for variety. For the first Italian machine in the Final Parking Space series, however, we’ve got a much rarer find: a genuine Maserati Biturbo Spyder, found in a boneyard located between Denver and Cheyenne.

1989 was an interesting year for the Maserati brand, because that was when the longtime friendship between Maserati owner Alejandro de Tomaso and Chrysler president Lee Iacocca resulted in a collaboration between the two companies that produced a car called, awkwardly, Chrysler’s TC by Maserati.

The TC by Maserati was based on a variation of Chrysler’s company-reviving K platform and assembled in Milan. I’ve documented five discarded TCs during the past decade, and those articles have never failed to spur heated debate over the TC’s genuine Maserati-ness.

In fact, I’ve managed to find even more examples of the Biturbo than the TC during my adventures in junkyard history, and even the most devoted trident-heads must accept those cars as true Maseratis.

The Biturbo was Maserati’s first attempt to build a mass-production car, and it went on sale in the United States as a 1984 model. It was available here through 1990, at various times as a four-door sedan (known as the 425 or 430), a two-door coupe, and as a convertible (known as the Spyder). This car is the first Spyder I’ve found in a car graveyard.

The heart of the Biturbo, and the origin of its name, is a screaming overhead-cam V-6 with twin turbochargers.

Unfortunately, the 1984-1986 Biturbos sold on our side of the Atlantic used a blow-through fuel-delivery system featuring a Weber carburetor inside a pressurized box, with no intercoolers. Forced induction systems with carburetors never did prove very reliable for daily street use, and the carbureted/non-intercooled Biturbo proved to be a legend of costly mechanical misery in the real world.

This car came from the factory with both Weber-Marelli electronic fuel injection and an intercooler, rated at 225 horsepower and 246 pound-feet in U.S.-market configuration. This more modern fuel-delivery rig didn’t solve all of the Biturbo’s reliability problems, but it didn’t hurt.

A three-speed automatic was available in the American Biturbo, but this car has the five-speed manual that its engine deserved.

When everything worked correctly, the 1989 Biturbo was fast and decadent, with nearly as much power as a new 1989 BMW M6 for about ten grand cheaper. The Spyder for that year had an MSRP of $44,995, or about $116,500 in 2024 dollars. Sure, a Peugeot 505 Turbo had an MSRP of $26,335 ($68,186 after inflation) and just 45 fewer horses, but was it Italian? Well, was it?

Soon after the time the first Biturbos hit American roads, I was a broke college student delivering pizzas with my Competition Orange 1968 Mercury Cyclone in Newport Beach, California. At that time and place, bent bankers and their henchmen were busily looting Orange County S&Ls, and the free-flowing cash resulted in Biturbos appearing everywhere for a couple of years. Then, like a switch had been flipped, they disappeared.

This car appears to have been sold all the way across the country from Lincoln Savings & Loan, so it doesn’t benefit from that Late 1980s Robber Baron bad-boy mystique.

If you had one of these cars, you had to display one of these distinctive mobile phone antennas on your ride. A lot of them were fake, though.

This car appears to have been parked for at least a couple of decades, so I believe the 28,280 miles showing on the odometer represent the real final figure.

There’s some rust-through and the harsh High Plains Colorado climate has ruined most of the leather and wood inside. These cars are worth pretty decent money in good condition, but I suspect that it would take $50,000 to turn one like this into a $25,000 car.

Still, it has plenty of good parts available for local Biturbo enthusiasts. I bought the decklid badge for my garage wall, of course.

***

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Chrysler’s Plymouth Division used the Belvedere name from the 1951 through 1970 model years, and the first to get properly exuberant tailfins was the version built for 1955 and 1956. Here’s one of those cars, found at a Denver-area self-service car graveyard recently.

Just as was the case with such Detroit machines as the Chevrolet Malibu and Ford Crown Victoria, the Belvedere name began its automotive career appended to another model name that subsequently disappeared. This was the 1951-1953 Plymouth Cranbrook, the two-door hardtop version of which was designated the Cranbrook Belvedere.

The best-known Belvederes today are the 1962-1970 B-platform midsize cars, which served as the basis for the legendary Plymouth GTX and Road Runner muscle cars. After 1970, the Satellite name—itself a former Belvedere trim-level designation—shoved the Belvedere name aside.

Chrysler’s low-priced Plymouth Division sold cars like mad after World War II ended, but Plymouth’s dowdy late-1940s body designs were hurting sales by the time future-crazed 1954 rolled around; during that year, Buick and Oldsmobile blew by Plymouth in the sales standings. For the 1955 model year, new Plymouths got the Virgil Exner “Forward Look” treatment, fins and all.

Now Plymouths looked just as modern as their Chevy or Ford rivals, and sales increased by more than 240,000 units versus 1954.

Not only that, but 1955 Plymouth shoppers could opt for overhead-valve V-8 power under the hood for the first time—previously, every Plymouth since the brand’s birth had been powered by flathead straight-four or straight-six engines. Chevrolet had introduced an OHV V-8 of some importance for the 1955 model year as well, while Ford’s Y-Block V-8 had debuted the year before that.

Chrysler had been bolting its Hemi V-8 engines into high-end Chrysler-badged models since the 1951 model year, and even the DeSoto and Dodge Divisions eventually received the Hemi treatment. Lowly Plymouth, however, wasn’t about to get such a costly engine (until later on), so a cheap-to-manufacture “semi-Hemi” or “polyspherical” version with a single rocker shaft per cylinder head was devised. That engine family begat the Hy-Fire polyspherical-headed V-8, which used a different block design and eventually led to the LA-series small-block V8s that were built from the middle 1960s and into our current century.

This bubbling stew of related and not-so-related Chrysler V-8 engines gets very confusing in the 1956 model year, when new Plymouths could be purchased with either the semi-Hemi 269-cubic inch V-8 (also known as the 270) and its 180 horsepower or the A-series 276-cubic inch Poly V-8 (generally known as the 277) with 187 horses. This car has the latter type, which may be original or could be a swapped-in later version with more displacement. The A-series Poly V-8 proved to be something of an evolutionary dead end, though it was a successful engine that was installed in plenty of Chrysler machinery through 1967.

The base engine in the 1956 Belvedere remained the good old flathead straight-six, with a displacement of 230 cubic inches and an output of 125 horsepower.

The base transmission was a three-speed column-shifted manual, but this car was heavily optioned and came with the PowerFlite two-speed automatic transmission controlled by Chrysler’s new-for-1956 pushbutton shifter (the shifter, located to the left of the instrument panel, has been removed from this car).

The PowerFlite was a true automatic, unlike the earlier Fluid Drive.

This Motorola AM radio lacks markings for the CONELRAD nuclear-attack frequencies of 640 and 1240 kHz, even though they were required in 1956. Perhaps it’s an overseas-market radio.

The list price for a 1956 Belvedere four-door sedan with 269-cubic inch V-8 started at $2154, or about $25,201 in 2024 dollars. The automatic transmission added $184 to that ($2153 after inflation). A 1956 Chevrolet Bel Air sedan with 265-cubic inch V-8 and Powerglide two-speed automatic had an MSRP of $2356 ($27,564 in today’s money), while the 1956 Ford Fairlane sedan with 272-cubic inch V-8 and Ford-O-Matic three-speed automatic listed at $2409 ($28,184 now).

The Plymouth Division was named for a brand of rope popular with American farmers at the time, but later on the branding changed focus to Plymouth Rock and the Mayflower. During the middle 1950s, Plymouth logos depicted the Wampanoag people humbly presenting gifts to their future conquerors.

This car has very little serious rust for a 68-year-old car that has been sitting outdoors in Colorado for decades, though the interior has been thoroughly nuked by the harsh High Plains climate.

It could be restored, but that might not be an economically sensible choice for a fairly ordinary mid-1950s Plymouth post sedan. The more powerful Fury hardtop coupe gets most of the attention given to ’56 Plymouths these days.

This car’s final parking space is among many other interesting vehicles from the 1930s through 1970s (including the 1952 IHC L-130, 1959 Borgward Isabella Coupé, 1958 Edsel Citation, 1963 Chevrolet Corvair Monza Club Coupe, and 1963 Chrysler Newport that have appeared in this series) at Colorado Auto & Parts, located just south of Denver.

CAP is home to the famous aircraft-radial-powered 1939 Plymouth truck, which was built there by members of the family that has owned the establishment since the 1950s. If you stop by to buy some ’56 Belvedere parts, you’ll see this pickup parked next to the cashier’s counter.

Yes, it runs and drives!

***

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The Type 1 Volkswagen first went on sale in the United States in 1949, and two were sold. After that, VW dealers here did increasingly well with the Type 1—eventually known as der Käfer or the Beetle— with each passing year, with the American Beetle sales pinnacle reached in 1968. These cars have become uncommon in car graveyards in recent years, but I found this fairly solid ’70 in Colorado last winter.

For the 1970 model year, Volkswagen of America offered five models, all built in West Germany: the Beetle, the Karmann Ghia, the Fastback, the Squareback, and the Transporter (which was pitched as the Volkswagen Station Wagon at the time).

The 1970 Beetle was available as a convertible, as a two-door sedan, and as a two-door sedan with sunroof. Today’s FPS car is the latter type, which had a list price of $1929 when new (about $16,001 in 2024 dollars). The non-sunroof sedan cost just $1839 that year ($15,254 after inflation).

The Beetle wasn’t the cheapest new car Americans could buy in 1970, but it was a lot of car for the money. The 1970 Austin America (known as the Austin 1100/1300 in its homeland) had an MSRP of $1815, while American Renault dealers offered a new 10 for a mere $1775. The 1970 Toyota Corolla two-door sedan had an astonishing list price of $1686, which helped it become the second-best-selling import (after the Beetle) in the United States that year, while Mazda offered the $1798 1200 two-door. For the adventurous, there was the motorcycle-engine-powered Honda 600, priced to sell at $1398, and Malcolm Bricklin was eager to sell you a new Subaru 360 for only $1297. How about a 1970 Fiat 850 sedan for $1504? The Ford Pinto and Chevrolet Vega debuted as 1971 models, so the most affordable new American-built 1970 car was the $1879 AMC Gremlin.

The first factory-installed Beetle sunroofs opened up most of the roof with a big sliding fabric cover, but a more modern metal sunroof operated by a crank handle replaced that type for 1964.

The final U.S.-market air-cooled Beetles were sold as 1979 models, which meant that Beetles were very easy to find in American junkyards until fairly deep into the 1990s. You’ll still run across discarded Beetles today, though most of them will be in rough shape and they tend to get picked clean in a hurry.

Volkswagen introduced the Super Beetle, which received a futuristic MacPherson strut front suspension and lengthened snout, as a 1971 model in the United States. Most of the Beetles you’ll find in the boneyards today will be of the Super variety, which makes today’s non-Super an especially good find for the junkyard connoisseur.

I’ve owned a few Beetles over the years, including a genuinely terrifying ’58 Sunroof Sedan with hot-rodded Type 3 engine that I purchased at age 17 for $50 at an Oakland junkyard. It acquired the name “Hubert the Hatred Bug” due to being the least Herbie-like Beetle imaginable. Later, I acquired a 1973 Super Beetle and thought it neither handled nor rode better than the regular Beetle; your opinion of the Super may differ.

The Type 1 Beetle was obsolete very early on, being a 1930s design optimized for ease of manufacture, but it was so cheap to build and simple to maintain that customers were willing to buy it for decade after decade. Beetle production blew past that of the seemingly unbeatable Model T Ford in 1972, when the 15,007,034th example rolled off the line, and the final Vocho was assembled in Mexico in 2003. That means a last-year Beetle will be legal to import to the United States in just four years!

The first water-cooled Volkswagen offered in the United States was the 1974 Dasher, which was really an Audi 80. It was the introduction of the Rabbit a year later (plus increasingly strict safety and emissions standards) that finally doomed the Type 1 Beetle here; Beetle sales dropped from 226,098 in 1974 to 78,412 in 1975 and then fell off an even steeper cliff after that. For the 1978 and 1979 model years, the only new Beetles available here were Super convertibles.

The original engine in this car was a 1585cc boxer-four rated at 57 horsepower, although there’s plenty of debate on the subject of air-cooled VW power numbers to this day. These engines are hilariously easy to swap and were once cheap and plentiful, though, so the chances that we are looking at this car’s original plant aren’t very good.

This is a single-port carbureted engine with a generator, so it could be the original 1600… or maybe it’s the ninth engine to power this car. Generally, junkyard Type 1 engines get grabbed right away these days, but this car had just been placed in the yard when I arrived.

The hateful Automatic Stickshift three-speed transmission was available as an option in the 1970 Beetle, but this car has the regular four-on-the-floor manual.

To get into reverse, you push down on the gearshift and then into the second-gear position (this can be a frustrating process in a VW with worn-out shifter linkage components).

By air-cooled Volkswagen standards, this car isn’t especially rusty. I’m surprised that it ended up at a Pick Your Part yard, to be honest… and now here’s the bad news for you VW fanatics itching to go buy parts from it: I shot these photos last December and the car got crushed months ago. I shoot so many vehicles in their final parking spaces that I can’t write about every one of them while they’re still around.

It even had the original factory Sapphire XI AM radio.

***

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The American Motors Corporation did good business selling small, sensible cars bearing the Rambler brand during the late 1950s through early 1960s. Rambler sales peaked in the 1962 model year, after which competition from new compact and midsize offerings from the Detroit Big Three made life tougher for the not-so-big Kenosha outfit. During the middle 1960s, AMC battled for midsize sales against the likes of the Chevrolet Chevelle and Plymouth Belvedere with its Rambler Classic. Today we’ll admire the first AMC product in this series with a Classic 660 found in a yard located between Denver and Cheyenne.

The Classic began life as a 1961 model during George Romney’s reign at AMC, then got a complete redesign for 1963 and became bigger and more modern-looking. Unfortunately for AMC, Ford introduced the Fairlane as a 1962 model, while Chrysler was right there with brand-new B-Body midsize machinery at the same time. As if that wasn’t enough, GM stepped up with the Chevelle and its A-Body siblings for the 1964 model year.

AMC, by then without Romney (who had gone on to become governor of Michigan), completely redesigned the Classic for 1965 and it looked just as slick as its many rivals. The following year, the Rambler name entered a phase-out period that was completed when the final AMC Ramblers were sold as 1969 models (the last year for Rambler as a separate marque was 1968).

The 1965 Classic was a bit smaller than the Fairlane, Chevelle, and Belvedere, though somewhat bigger than the Commander from soon-to-be-gone Studebaker.

The ’65 Classic offered plenty of value per dollar; the list price for this car would have been $2287 (about $22,894 in 2024 dollars). Its most menacing sales rival was the Chevelle Malibu, which had an MSRP of $2299 ($23,105 in today’s money) with roughly similar equipment.

This car is a 660, which was the mid-priced trim level slotted between the 550 and 770. Rambler shoppers who wanted to pinch a penny until it screamed could get a zero-frills Rambler 550 two-door sedan for just $2142 ($21,443 after inflation), which just barely undercut the cheapest Ford Fairlane Six ($2183) and Chevelle 300 ($2156) two-door sedans. Studebaker would sell you a new Commander two-door for a mere $2125 that year, but found few takers for that deal.

The 1965 Classic’s light weight (curb weight of 2882 pounds for the 660 four-door) made it respectably quick even with a six-cylinder engine. This car was built with an AMC 232-cubic-incher rated at 145 horsepower. If you wanted a genuine factory hot rod Classic for ’65, a 327-cubic-inch V-8 (not related to Chevrolet’s 327) with 270 horses was available.

But back to the straight six: This incredibly successful engine family went on to serve American Motors and then Chrysler all the way through 2006, when the final 4.0-liter versions were bolted into Jeep Wranglers. The 232 was used in new AMC cars through 1979.

Automatic transmissions were very costly during the middle 1960s and the Classic didn’t get a four-on-the-floor manual transmission until 1966, so the thrifty original buyer of this car went with the base three-speed column-shift manual.

At least it has a factory AM radio, a $58.50 option ($586 now).

You had to pay extra to get a heater in the cheapest 1965 Studebakers, but a genuine Weather Eye heater/ventilation system was standard equipment in every 1965 Rambler Classic.

AMC sold more than 200,000 Classics for 1965, and the most popular version was the 660 sedan. I still find Classics regularly in car graveyards, so these cars aren’t particularly rare even today.

This one is just too rough and too common to be worth restoring, but some of its parts should live on in other Ramblers.

Its final parking space has it right next to another affordable American machine that deserved a better fate: A 1979 Dodge Aspen station wagon.

***

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So far in this series, we’ve seen discarded cars from the United States, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and Sweden, but no trucks (unless you count a Volkswagen Transporter, which I don’t). We’ll remedy that imbalance today with a serious truck, an IHC L-Series that spent its working years in northern Illinois and now resides in a car graveyard near Denver, Colorado.

The Chicago-based International Harvester Corporation sold its first light trucks in 1907 and continued to build them until the final Scout Terras left the factory as 1980 models. You can still buy new International-badged trucks today, though their parent company is owned by Volkswagen.

This is an L-Series truck, the successor to the prewar KB design. The L-Series was built from the 1950 through 1952 model years and featured a modern, one-piece windshield.

This one appears to have toiled as a tow truck in Spring Valley, Illinois, for its entire career. That’s about 900 miles to the east of its current location in Colorado.

The truck is very weathered, and the 1975 Illinois license plate indicates that it has been sitting outdoors for close to a half-century.

How many stranded cars did this rig pull out of ditches and snowbanks during its career?

All the equipment appears to be genuine 1950s–1970s hardware.

At some point, an Oldsmobile transistor radio of the late CONELRAD era was installed in the dash.

The original engine was a 220-cubic-inch “Silver Diamond” IHC pushrod straight-six rated at 101 brake horsepower, and that may well be the engine still in the truck today (you have to be more of an IHC expert than I am to identify these engines at a glance).

The transmission is a three-on-the-floor manual, with a grind-free synchronized first gear.

This thick steel bumper must have been just the ticket for pushing dead cars, which would have been plentiful in the era of six-volt electrical systems, points ignition, and primitive tire technology.

As the theoretical owner of a 1947 GMC tow truck (which has been sitting in a field just south of Minneapolis since I was five years old), I understand why most of us are reluctant to restore such machines.

***

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During the 1970s, American car shoppers looking to commute in a two-seat European roadster at a reasonable price had two obvious choices: the Fiat 124 Sport Spider and the MG MGB. I see plenty of discarded examples of both types during my junkyard travels, but genuine chrome-bumper MGBs are much harder to find in car graveyards than the later “rubber-bumper” cars and any Fiat 124 Spiders. Today we’ve got one of those cars, spotted in a Pull-A-Part in Columbia, South Carolina recently.

One of the first cars we saw in this series was an MG, but it was a U.K.-market 2005 ZT 190 from the final days of pre-Chinese-ownership MG. You can buy a new MG in many parts of the world right now (in fact, MG’s 100th anniversary just took place last year), but the final model year for new Morris Garage products in the United States was 1980. That was when the final MGBs were sold here, a year after we got our last Midgets.

MG was part of the mighty British Leyland empire from 1968 through 1986, and many BL products received these badges for a time during the early 1970s.

The MGB was the successor to the MGA, and one of the best-selling British cars ever offered in the United States. Sales of the MGB began here in the 1963 model year and continued through 1980.

At first, all MGBs were two-seat roadsters. A Pininfarina-styled fastback coupe called the MGB GT first appeared in the United States as a 1966 model.

I owned a British Racing Green 1973 MGB-GT as my daily driver while I was in college during the late 1980s, and that car— which I loved, most of the time— made me a much better mechanic.

Like this car, my B had a 1.8-liter pushrod BMC B engine rated at 78.5 horsepower (yes, British Leyland claimed that half-horse in marketing materials). These cars aren’t at all fast with the stock running gear, but they are fun.

In theory, some MGBs were built with Borg-Warner automatic transmissions, but every example I’ve ever seen had a four-speed manual. An electrically-actuated overdrive unit was a much-sought-after option in these cars.

This car has the optional wire wheels, which would have been bought within days of showing up in a U-Pull junkyard 30 years ago. Nowadays, though, most MGB owners who want wire wheels have them already.

In 1973, the MSRP for a new MGB roadster was $3545 (about $25,991 in 2024 dollars). Meanwhile, its Fiat 124 Sport Spider rival listed at $3816 ($27,978 after inflation).

The 124 Sport Spider for ’73 came with a more modern 1.6-liter DOHC straight-four rated at 90 horsepower. That was quite a bit more than the MGB, but the Fiat also scaled in at 200 more pounds than its English rival. The MGB was sturdier, while both cars had similarly character-building electrical systems.

British Leyland also offered the Triumph TR6 and its 106 horsepower for 1973, with a $3980 price tag ($29,180 now). If you wanted a genuinely quick European convertible that year, your best bet was to spend $4948 ($36,277 in today’s money) for a new Alfa Romeo Spider Veloce… which took you into the same price range as a new Chevrolet Corvette.

This car is reasonably complete and not particularly rusty. Why is it here, just a few rows away from a Toyota Avalon that came within a hair of hitting the million-mile mark on its odometer?

Project MGBs are still fairly easy to find, so cars like this often sit in driveways or yards for decades before being sent on that final, sad tow-truck ride.

Still, the 1973 and early 1974 MGBs are the final models before federal crash-bumper and headlight-height regulations resulted in MGBs with big black rubber bumpers and lifted suspensions. This car should have been worth enough to avoid such a junkyardy fate, but perhaps South Carolina isn’t much of a hotbed for MGB enthusiasts nowadays.

***

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Last week, we admired a majestic 1984 Mercedes-Benz S-Class in a Colorado car graveyard, adding to a collection of Final Parking Space machines from (West) Germany that includes BMW, Volkswagen, and Ford-Werke. Plenty of lesser-known German manufacturers have sold cars in the United States, of course, and today we’ve got a discarded example of one of the best-looking cars to come out of Bremen: a Borgward Isabella Coupé, photographed in a self-service yard just south of Denver, Colorado.

Carl Borgward came up in the Bremen car industry, rising through the ranks at Hansa-Lloyd and selling cars badged with his own name starting in 1924. After World War II, he began building Lloyds, Goliaths, and Borgwards, with the Borgward Hansa his first postwar model.

In 1954, the Isabella replaced the Hansa, though Hansa Isabella badging was used for a while.

The Isabella sedan came first, followed by convertible and wagon versions in 1955. The Isabella Coupé appeared in 1957, and production continued in West Germany until the company went (controversially) broke in 1961. Borgward production using the old tooling from the Bremen plant resumed in Monterrey, Mexico, in 1967 and continued through 1970.

The Isabella sold reasonably well in the United States, considering the obscurity of the Borgward brand here. For the 1959 model year, just over 7500 cars were sold out of American Borgward dealerships.

The U.S.-market MSRP for a 1959 Isabella Coupé was $3750, or about $40,388 in 2024 dollars. The base 1959 Porsche 356 coupe listed at $3665 ($39,472 after inflation), while a new 1959 Jaguar XK150 coupe cost $4500 ($48,465 in today’s money).

Meanwhile, GM’s Chevrolet division offered a new 1959 Corvette for just $3,875 ($41,734). The Isabella Coupé faced some serious competition in its price range.

These cars haven’t held their value quite as well as the 356 or Corvette (though nice ones do change hands for real money) and restoration parts are tougher to source, so there are affordable project Isabella Coupés out there for the adventurous. A 24 Hours of Lemons team found this ’59 and raced it several times with the original drivetrain, winning the coveted Index of Effluency award in the process.

Not bad for a race car with 66 horsepower under the hood… 60 years earlier.

The Fistful of Cotter Pins team members were kind enough to give me the MotoMeter dash clock out of their race Borgward. The mechanism is bad but the face still looks good when illuminated in my garage.

The clock in this car has experienced too many decades outdoors in the harsh climate of High Plains Colorado to be worth harvesting for my collection.

The engine in this car is a 1.5-liter overhead-valve straight-four with a distinctive carburetor location atop the valve cover.

The transmission is a four-speed column-shift manual.

The odometer shows 55,215 miles, and that may well be the actual final total.

This car was in the Colorado Auto & Parts “private reserve” yard, off-limits to customers for many years. Then that lot was sold, and many of its former inhabitants were moved to the regular U-Pull section. We’ve seen some of those cars in earlier episodes of this series, including a 1958 Edsel Citation, a 1963 Chevrolet Corvair Monza, and a 1963 Chrysler Newport sedan.

The good news about this car is that CAP will sell you the whole thing, being a non-corporate yard owned by the Corns family since the late 1950s. You’ll be able to check out the famous radial-engine-powered 1939 Plymouth, built on the premises, in the office when you visit.

This car appears to be a bit too rough to be economically viable as a restoration, but there are still plenty of good parts to help fix up nicer Isabellas. Or you could make a race car out of it, which we recommend.

I like to use ancient film cameras to shoot junkyard vehicles, and I took a few photographs of this car (and many others) with a 1920s Ansco Memo.

This double exposure (always a hazard with century-old cameras) came out looking interesting, and the Isabella was an appropriate subject.

***

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For what seemed like generations (but was really just 20 model years), the Ford Motor Company sold a Police Interceptor version of the Crown Victoria sedan. The final Crown Victoria was built in September of 2011, and today’s Final Parking Space subject was built in August of that year. That’s history!

Most sources seem to indicate that the very last Crown Victoria Police Interceptor rolled off the St. Thomas assembly line in August of 2011, so this car is one of the final handful built. Sharp-eyed readers may note that the PI’s characteristic “P71” sequence is lacking from the VIN here, but that’s just because Ford changed the code to “P7B” for the last two model years.

I have spent many years looking in car graveyards and elsewhere for a P7B Crown Vic built during the summer of 2011; prior to now, the newest example I’d found was this 24 Hours of Lemons race car in Colorado with a May 2011 build date.

Last year, I ran across this 2011 P7B in Denver with a January 2011 build date, which seemed impressive at the time. Locating an example of such an important vehicle from the final month of production is the kind of thing we junkyard historians shoot for.

I found this car on Opening Day at LKQ Pick Your Part’s brand-new Denver yard, when all the inventory was at its freshest.

I have a soft spot for the P71/P7B Crown Victoria, because I had one as a daily driver for the second half of the 2000s. In 2004, I bought a 1997 P71 that had been a San Joaquin County (California) parole officer’s unmarked car. No arrestees had ever leaked bodily fluids in the back seat (a problem with ex-police cars driven on patrol for years) and there were no spotlight holes in the A pillars. I put tens of thousands of miles on that car and enjoyed its excellent handling and powerful air conditioning.

It even came with a bunch of evidence Polaroids and urine test kits in the trunk. I wonder what the perp in that red Toyota MR2 did.

This car is the only ex-police car I’ve ever found in a junkyard that still had the pee-proof fiberglass back seat and protective screen in place; normally, police departments remove them to use in their other cars, but the remaining Crown Vic Police Interceptors are nearly gone and whatever agency owned this car must have decided it wasn’t worth the hassle to salvage this stuff before disposing of it.

The push bumper is still here, too.

The electronic odometer means I couldn’t check the final mileage total without powering up the car’s ECU. Most discarded P71s with mechanical odometers that I’ve found have had between 100,000 and 200,000 miles showing, though I have spotted one ’02 P71 that worked as a taxi after its law-enforcement duties were done and racked up better than 400,000 miles during its career.

All of the 1992-2011 Crown Victoria Police Interceptors got the 4.6 Modular SOHC V8 engine under their hoods. This one was rated at 250 horsepower and 297 pound-feet; since the car scaled in at just over two tons, it wasn’t especially quick off the line.

While the P71/P7B wasn’t particularly quick, it was equipped with an extra-heavy-duty cooling system that could keep the engine alive under far more punitive conditions that ordinary civilian cars ever experience. Idling for hours with the A/C blasting in Phoenix in August? No problem!

On top of that, these cars can achieve real-world highway fuel economy approaching 25 miles per gallon.

The cop suspension, cop tires, and cop shocks made the ride a bit firmer than what Grandma got in her floating-on-a-cloud Crown Victoria LX, but they also gave the Police Interceptor impressively nimble handling for a car this size.

This car, along with its Mercury Grand Marquis and Lincoln Town Car siblings, was one of the last built on Ford’s versatile Panther platform. The first Panthers were 1979 models, so Ford certainly got its money’s worth out of that chassis design.

At some point near the end, this car slid into dirt hard enough to embed vegetation and soil between the tire bead and the wheel. Perhaps there was sufficient suspension damage to make its final owner give up on it.

***

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Four months into this series, we have seen three discarded vehicles built in (West) Germany: a 1974 Ford Capri, a 1981 Volkswagen Vanagon, and a 1984 BMW 325e. Conspicuously missing from that lineup is a vehicle made by the manufacturer that built the very first car 136 years ago, so today we’ll take a look at an example of the most legendary of all the Mercedes-Benz S-Classes, a 380 SE recently found in a Denver self-service yard.

This car is a W126, which fits in the S-Class pantheon between the W116 and the W140 and was sold in the United States for the 1980 through 1991 model years. In my opinion, the W126 was the best-built Mercedes-Benz of all time and probably one of the best-built motor vehicles of all time, period (the Toyota Century beats the W126 in that department).

Most W126 models were quite a bit more expensive (in inflation-adjusted dollars) than the current S-Classes. This one had an MSRP of $43,030, or about $131,043 in 2024 dollars. If you wanted the king of the W126s in 1984 (the 500 SEC coupe), the list price was $57,100, or $173,892 in today’s money.

Because those prices were so steep and the Deutschmark was so weak against the dollar during the early-to-middle 1980s, tens of thousands of American car shoppers bought W126s in West Germany and imported them via the gray market, saving plenty of money but enraging American Mercedes-Benz dealers (who eventually succeeded in lobbying that loophole closed). This car was imported via legitimate dealership channels, but I’ve found quite a few gray-market Mercedes-Benzes of this era during my junkyard travels, including a 1980 280, a 1980 500 SE, a 1981 380 SEL, and a 1983 500 SEC.

Because these cars held together so well, they still show up regularly in car graveyards around the country. This 380 SE has low miles for a thrown-out W126, but I’ve found a couple of these cars showing better than a half-million miles on their odometers.

This one looks to have had a solid body and nice interior when it arrived here, but even a W126 is going to have the occasional mechanical problem and repairs tend to be costly.

This car had a stack of parking tickets from Longmont, Colorado, under its wipers, though, so it may have been a good runner that got towed away and auctioned off due to unpaid fines.

This being a 380, its engine is a 3.8-liter gasoline-fueled SOHC V-8 rated at 155 horsepower and 196 pound-feet of torque. For 1984, American Mercedes-Benz W126 shoppers could also get a 300 SD powered by a straight-five turbodiesel with 123 horses and 184 lb-ft of torque or a 500 SEL/SEC boasting 184 hp with 247 lb-ft.

Because 1984 S-Classes weighed between 3685 to 3870 pounds—featherweight stuff by the standards of 2024—even the oil-burners were tolerably quick (the current C-Class is hundreds of pounds heavier than this 380 SE, while the ’24 S-Class outweighs it by more than a half-ton).

In Europe, the 1979–84 S-Classes with non-V-8 engines could be purchased with manual transmissions, but all U.S-market W126s came with mandatory four-speed automatics.

This 380 SE will be crushed, but we can hope that many of its parts will live on in other W126s.

***

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An interesting way to look at automotive history through a junkyard lens is to follow the evolution of a model over time. This is fairly easy with a model that sold well decade after decade, like the Chevrolet Malibu or Honda Civic, but how about a model that was built sporadically from 1940 through 1981 and went through roller-coaster sales highs and lows during that time? The Chrysler Newport is such a car, and today we’ll follow up the 1963 Newport sedan we admired a few months ago with one of its hardtop successors from the following decade.

Chrysler redesigned its full-sized C-Body cars for the 1969 model year, giving them what was known as the “Fuselage” look.

The Newport was the most affordable of the big Chryslers for 1971, slotted beneath the 300 and New Yorker in the prestige pyramid. The Imperial also lived on the C platform at that time, but it was its own more exclusive marque and not given Chrysler badging until the 1984 model year.

This car is also a platform sibling to more affordable Dodge- and Plymouth-badged machines, the Monaco, Polara and Fury.

The Custom trim level was one step above the base 1971 Newport, with an MSRP of $4990 for the four-door hardtop (about $38,908 in 2024 dollars). The base Newport’s price tag was $4709 for the four-door post sedan ($36,717 in today’s money).

There was quite a bit of overlap involving the prices of the various C-Body cars for 1971, and a heavy hand with options could result in a lowly Fury that cost more than a Newport or even a 300. For example, the mechanically nearly identical 1971 Dodge Monaco four-door hardtop started at $4362 ($34,011 after inflation). This same sort of prestige line-blurring was taking place at Ford and GM, too.

That said, the 1971 Newport was a lot of luxury machine for the money. The problem for Chrysler Corporation, then as well as now, was that the Chrysler brand itself didn’t come with a huge amount of snob appeal.

The ’71 Newport Custom came with a high-torque 383-cubic inch big-block V-8 (that’s 6.3 liters to those of you laboring under the cruel lash of the metric system) rated at 275 horsepower as standard equipment. Pay an extra 208 bucks (1622 bucks today) and you’d get a Newport with a 440-cubic-inch (7.2-liter) V-8 rated at 335 horses.

Now let’s talk about what you didn’t get as standard equipment in your new 1971 Newport. First of all, even a single-speaker AM-only radio cost $92 ($717 now). Air conditioning started at $426 ($3322 today), and an automatic transmission set you back $241 ($1879 in 2024 dollars), although late-model-year 1971 Newports got the slushbox instead of the base three-on-the-tree manual at no extra cost. Even power steering was $125 ($975 after inflation). We’re all spoiled by the standard features we get nowadays!

The build tag says this car was built at the Jefferson Avenue plant in Detroit, where Chalmers and Maxwell cars were built starting in 1908.

It appears to have been sold new in Dallas, Texas.

Early in its driving career, this Chrysler moved to Denver. It now resides in a self-service yard across town from the long-defunct shop on the southeastern side of the city where its service was performed.

Just about every receipt affiliated with this car going back to the middle 1970s was still inside. It appears to have had one owner since at least 1978 and maybe earlier.

There were handwritten notes about maintenance and parts purchases spanning more than 35 years.

High Plains Colorado has a climate that kills padded vinyl roofs in a hurry, but the rest of the car is very solid. It could have been put back on the road without too much trouble, but that didn’t happen.

***

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We’ve looked at a couple of controversial General Motors classics in this series so far (the Chevrolet Corvair and the Pontiac Fiero) but just a single Ford product that stirs up heated debate among enthusiasts (the Mustang II). Today we’re going to restore GM/Ford balance by taking a look at a discarded example of the most polarizing Ford Motor Company product ever built: the Edsel!

The Edsel brand was created after exhaustive market research and consultation with focus groups, with plenty of futuristic statistical analysis and—more significantly—office politics stirring the pot. Sadly, the car itself didn’t get put in front of consumer focus groups before its unveiling.

The general idea was that Dearborn needed a mid-priced brand to squeeze in between aspirational Mercury and wealth-flaunting Lincoln, in order for Ford to better compete with GM and its “Ladder of Success” model (in which a customer would get a Chevrolet as his first car, then climb the rungs of increasingly prestigious Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, and Cadillac as he became more successful).

After much heated debate, the new brand was named after Henry Ford’s eldest son. Edsel Ford was a creative visionary with good business sense who spent his life butting heads with his stubborn old man and died young while fighting to save the company from Henry the First’s obsession with building ever-cheaper Model Ts forever.

As we all know, the Edsel Division flopped hard. After much pre-launch hype before the “E-Day” launch in September of 1957, the seven Edsel models went on sale as 1958 models. The final Edsels were built as 1960 models.

Sales for the ’58s were solid at first, though the radical styling put off some potential buyers. A bigger problem was the fact that Edsel pricing had the new division competing directly against Mercury, whose Montclair and Monterey shared their platform with the Edsel Corsair and Citation. Meanwhile, the cheaper Edsel Ranger’s price tag was uncomfortably similar to that of the Ford Fairlane 500. To make matters worse, the very cheapest 1958 Lincoln was still priced well above the most expensive Edsel.

Then, wouldn’t you know, the Eisenhower Recession hit new-car sales hard in 1958 and 1959. American car shoppers began paying increasingly strong attention to list prices and fuel economy, and the flashy, thirsty Edsels sat on dealership lots while American Motors cashed in with Rambler sales and Volkswagen of America moved more Beetles than ever before. Even Renault prospered here with the Dauphine for a couple of years.

The Edsel Division got merged into Lincoln-Mercury (there was never any such thing as a “Ford Edsel”) while resources were poured into the compact car that became the 1960 Ford Falcon. Robert McNamara, future architect of the Vietnam War, became president of Ford in 1960, and Edsel zealots enthusiasts often cast him as the villain who killed the Edsel in favor of the Falcon.

Who or what really killed Edsel? It’s hard to get angry about the Falcon, which was a stunning sales success in its own right and whose chassis design underpinned everything from the 1964–73 Mustang to the 1980 Granada. The recession? Changing consumer tastes? Communist agents? In any case, I’m glad that I was able to find this first-year Citation to write about.

Look, it even has a Continental kit! I found this car at Colorado Auto & Parts, just south of Denver. It’s got more than 100 Detroit vehicles from the ’40s through the ’70s in its inventory right now, including another 1958 Edsel Citation.

The engine is a 410-cubic-inch MEL V-8, rated at 345 gross horsepower.

The base transmission was a column-shift three-speed manual, but this car has the optional automatic with pushbutton shifter on the steering wheel hub.

The Citation was at the top of the Edsel pyramid for 1958, so most buyers wouldn’t have tolerated a lowly manual transmission in one.

***

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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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During the late 1960s through early 1970s, the Detroit car manufacturers made a serious effort to bring over the products made by their operations in Western Europe; though some Vauxhalls and British Fords had been imported in earlier years, they had remained well outside the American automotive mainstream. GM offered various Opel models, Chrysler took a shot at moving Americanized Simca 1100s and Hillman Avengers, and Ford opted to sell its new sporty fastback here. This was the Capri, and I’ve found a snow-dusted first-generation example in a Denver-area car graveyard.

The Capri name has a lengthy history in the Ford Empire, beginning with the Lincoln Cosmopolitan Capri of the early 1950s, but this type of Capri is by far the best known. In the United States, this car was sold through Mercury dealers with no marque badging.

I came of driving age in Northern California in the early 1980s, and at that time everybody I knew referred to these cars—which were still common sights on the roads of the Golden State—as Mercury Capris despite the lack of Mercury badging.

Dearborn began selling Fox-body Mustang twins with Mercury Capri badging for the 1979 model year, with production continuing through 1986. The Mercury Capri name returned for the 1991 through 1994 model years, on an Australian-built two-seat convertible based on the platform of the Mazda 323. Those Capris are by far the easiest to find in American boneyards today.

This type of Capri was sold in the United States for the 1970 through 1977 model years, and most North American owners of these cars prefer to use the European “Ford Capri” designation to avoid confusion with the later, Mercury-badged Capris.

By the early 1970s, the Mustang had become bigger, heavier, and more luxurious than its mid-1960s predecessors, so it made sense that Ford should offer a lightweight sporty car for Americans who preferred nimble handling and decent fuel economy.

All U.S.-market Ford Capris were built in Cologne, West Germany. For other markets, they were assembled in the United Kingdom, Singapore, Australia, and South Africa.

Capri sales improved each year at first, reaching the 90,000 mark for 1972 and topping 100,000 units sold for 1973. Then Ford introduced a new, smaller Mustang based on a modified Pinto platform for 1974; it was a few hundred pounds heavier than the Capri but also quite a bit cheaper. Capri sales in the United States began a steady decline at that point.

The 1974 Capri had an MSRP of $3566 with four-cylinder engine and four-speed manual transmission, or about $23,601 in 2024 dollars. Meanwhile, the 1974 Mustang II started at just $3081 ($20,391 after inflation).

There were plenty of similarities to be seen in the engine compartments of the Mustang II and its same-year Capri intra-corporate competitors. This car came with a 2.0-liter SOHC straight-four rated at 80 horsepower, while the base engine in the 1974 Mustang II was a 2.3-liter version of the same engine with 85 horses.

Both the Capri and the Mustang II for ’74 could be purchased with the 2.8-liter “Cologne” V-6 as optional equipment. That engine made 105 horsepower in both applications. For 1975, optional V-8 power returned to the Mustang, while the base Capri got the 2.3-liter four-banger.

This car has the optional three-speed automatic transmission, which added $256 to its cost ($1694 in today’s money). I think this is the first 1970–77 Capri I’ve ever seen with an automatic.

It’s not especially rusty, but decades of outdoor storage have taken their toll. The interior is full of rodent nesting material and droppings, a real hantavirus threat in High Plains Colorado.

I think this car hasn’t run under its own power for at least 40 years.

This Clarion equalizer/booster appears to be of early-1980s vintage.

The lack of horrific rust would make this car well worth restoring on the other side of the Atlantic, but it makes more sense as a parts car here.

***

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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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As the first-generation Mustang got bigger, heavier, and more expensive with each passing year, Lee Iacocca (who became president of Ford in 1970) decreed that a smaller second-generation model would be developed. This car, the Mustang II, first hit showrooms as a 1974 model, which turned out to be absolutely perfect timing after the OPEC oil embargo of October 1973 caused fuel prices to go through the roof. Here’s one of those first-year cars, found in a Denver-area self-service yard recently.

The original Mustang was designed as a sporty-looking commuter based on Ford’s smallest North American–market car of its time, the Falcon. The second-generation Mustang was based on a platform derived from Ford’s smallest North American–market car at that time: the Pinto.

This adaptation made sense from an engineering standpoint, since the Pinto used a modern lightweight design and was set up to use efficient engines from Ford’s European operations. The Mustang II’s chassis differed from the Pinto’s in significant ways—the most important being the wheelbase, which was longer—but the idea of a Mustang that shared ancestry with a tiny economy car originally designed to compete against the likes of the Volkswagen Beetle and Toyota Corolla caused—and still causes—discomfort to some enthusiasts.

None of this really mattered in the American Ford showrooms of 1974, where the Mustang II was an instant success. Sales of the 1974 Mustang were nearly triple those of the 1973 model, and they remained respectable throughout the Mustang II’s production run from 1974 to ’78. Some Mustang II sales may have been cannibalized by Ford’s own Capri, which was badged as a Ford in its European homeland but sold through Mercury dealers (without Mercury badging) in the United States; the Capri was a few hundred pounds lighter and shared the inline-four and V-6 engines used by the Mustang II.

The 1974 Mustang II was available with a choice of two engines: a 2.3-liter, single overhead-cam four-cylinder and a 2.8-liter pushrod V-6, both designed in Europe and both destined for long and successful careers in the global Ford Empire. This car has the 2.3.

This engine was rated at 85 horsepower, while the V-6 made 105 horses. Power numbers were down across the board for new cars sold in the United States when this car was built, due to stricter emissions and fuel-economy standards plus the switch from gross to net power ratings that had been mandated a couple of years earlier. Even so, the 2.3-powered 1974 Mustang II had a better power-to-weight ratio than the 1973 Mustang with the base 250-cubic-inch straight-six engine, and it boasted far superior handling and braking.

A four-speed manual transmission was base equipment in the Mustang II, and that’s the gearbox in this car. A three-speed automatic was available as an option.

1974 was the only model year in which there was no V-8 engine available in the Mustang, which stung. For the 1975 through 1978 model years, a 302-cubic-inch V-8 was available as a Mustang II option.

Another thing that made 1974 unpleasant for owners of Mustang IIs (and owners of all new cars sold in the United States for that model year) was the much-hated seat-belt starter interlock system. If all front-seat occupants (or grocery bags) weren’t wearing their belts, the car wouldn’t start; this sounded sensible in theory, but most Americans refused to wear seat belts at that time and the technology of 1974 made the system maddeningly malfunction-prone.

This car is a Ghia, the most expensive new Mustang II model of 1974. The Ghia package included a padded vinyl roof and a snazzier interior; its MSRP for ’74 was $2866 (about $18,866 in 2024 dollars).

The Ghia name came from Carrozzeria Ghia, an Italian coachbuilder and design house founded in 1916. Ghia was behind such beautiful machines as the Fiat 8V Supersonic, Renault Caravelle, and the Chrysler Turbine. The company ended up in the hands of Alejandro de Tomaso, who sold it to Ford in 1970. After that, Ford used the Ghia name to designate luxury trim levels on its vehicles throughout the world; in the United States, car shoppers could get Granadas and even Fiestas with Ghia badges.

This car has the “Westminster cloth” seat upholstery and shag carpeting that came with the Mustang II Ghia package.

The interior in this one is still in decent enough condition for its age, though junkyard shoppers have purchased the door panels.

The radio is a Philco AM/FM/eight-track stereo unit, likely installed by the dealer but perhaps by an aftermarket shop. It would have been very expensive in 1974, but worth it in order to listen to the Mustang-appropriate hits of that year.

According to the build tag, this car was built at the storied River Rouge plant in Michigan in April of 1974. The paint is Saddle Bronze Metallic, the interior is Tan, and the differential ratio is 3.55:1. Interestingly, the DSO code shows that the car was built for export sale. What stories could it tell of its travels?

The High Plains Colorado sun is murder on vinyl tops, and this one got nuked to oblivion long ago.

For the 1979 model year, the Mustang II was replaced by a third-generation Mustang that lived on the versatile Fox platform. Ford nearly replaced that Mustang with one based on a Mazda-sourced front-wheel-drive platform, but ended up keeping the Fox going through 1993 (or 2004, if you consider the Fox-descended SN95 platform to be a true Fox) and sold its Mazda-based sports coupe as the Probe. For what it’s worth, a stock V-6 Probe will eat up a stock same-year V-8 Fox Mustang on a road-race course; I’ve seen it happen many times in my capacity as Chief Justice of the 24 Hours of Lemons Supreme Court (the Fox Mustang has a pronounced advantage over the Probe on the dragstrip, though).

Worth restoring? You decide! The good news is that this yard will, unusually, sell whole cars. Perhaps someone will rescue this Mustang II from its inevitable date with The Crusher.

***

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The Chevrolet Corvair remains by far the most controversial American car ever made. With nearly two million built for the 1960 through 1969 model years, it’s also reasonably plentiful in American car graveyards to this day. Today’s Final Parking Space machine is a ’63 Corvair Monza two-door, now residing in a family-owned yard just south of the Denver city limits.

By the late 1950s, Volkswagen, Renault and other overseas manufacturers were proving that American car shoppers were willing to buy small cars, while American Motors was cleaning up by selling easy-to-maneuver Ramblers. In response, Ford got into the compact game with the Falcon while Chrysler did the same with the Valiant, both of which featured some engineering innovations but didn’t deviate far from traditional Detroit designs. General Motors, meanwhile, went radical with its design for a new compact for the Chevrolet Division to sell.

The Corvair had an air-cooled flat-six engine in the back, much like the later Porsche 911. This allowed GM to lighten the car by using a transaxle instead of separate transmission and drive axle assemblies, while also eliminating the weight and complexity of a liquid cooling system.

More important, the design permitted the use of a flat floor with no driveshaft tunnel. A bench-seat-equipped Corvair could thus fit six occupants while occupying a very small footprint and boasting a curb weight of about 2300 pounds (hundreds of pounds fewer than a 2024 Nissan Versa). Putting the engine behind the rear wheels also improved traction on snow and ice.

Drawbacks to the design included the difficulty of providing effective passenger heat to an air-cooled car and handling that proved much different than that of the front-engine/rear-wheel-drive cars that most Americans had been piloting since the days of the Ford Model T. Rear-engined cars tend to be prone to oversteering during loss of traction, and the early Corvair’s swing-axle rear suspension (similar to that of the VW Beetle and Mercedes-Benz W120) could cause rear-end jacking in extreme situations.

The 1962 death of comedian Ernie Kovacs in a Corvair crash made headlines, and Chevrolet didn’t help matters by skipping a front anti-sway bar on the early Corvairs (recommending 15 psi of front tire pressure instead). Continuous Corvair suspension improvements were made over the years, with a fully independent rear suspension going into the 1965 and later cars, but the damage to the Corvair’s reputation had been done.

Corvair sales peaked in 1961 and 1962, declined significantly during 1963 through 1965, then fell off a cliff in 1966. Production continued through 1969, but few were paying attention to the Corvair by that point. Ralph Nader gets most of the blame from enthusiasts for the demise of the Corvair, but his “Unsafe at Any Speed” wasn’t published until the end of 1965 and didn’t attract much mainstream attention until the following year. (For a deeper look at whether the Corvair will really kill you, click here -Ed.)

What really killed the Corvair was competition from within the Chevrolet Division itself, taking the form of the Chevy II/Nova compact. That car, which debuted as a 1962 model, wasn’t much bigger than the Corvair and had a traditional water-cooled engine driving the rear wheels (it didn’t hurt that it looked quite a bit like its handsome full-sized Chevrolet brethren). The Corvair barely edged out the Chevy II/Nova in sales for 1962, then fell steadily behind thereafter.

This car is a Corvair 900, also known as a Monza, the top Corvair trim level. The Monza began life in coupe-only form, but it spread to sedans and wagons soon after. GM had envisioned the Corvair sedan as the big seller for the line, but buyers flocked to the coupes and convertibles. Very bad news for Corvair sales arrived at Ford dealerships in 1964 when a certain Falcon-based sporty car hit the scene; every Mustang buyer was a potential Corvair Monza coupe buyer who got away.

From the build tag, we can see that this car was built at Willow Run Assembly in Michigan during the last week of October, 1962, and that the exterior paint was Ermine White. It was equipped with the optional folding rear seats.

It has the base three-speed manual transmission (a two-speed Powerglide was optional, as was a four-speed manual) and the 80-horsepower engine.

The optional AM radio shows the CONELRAD nuclear-attack frequencies at 640 and 1240 kHz. Nineteen-sixty-three was the last year in which these markings were required.

Worth restoring? This one is pretty rough from sitting outdoors in the harsh High Plains Colorado climate for decades, so it makes more economic sense as a parts donor for nicer Corvairs.

***

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The final new MGs sold in the United States were 1980-model-year MGBs, after many decades of Morris Garage machinery winning hearts on our side of the Atlantic. There were new T-Types, MGAs, MGBs, Midgets, Magnettes, 1100s, and other cars roaring out of American MG dealerships, with MGBs and Midgets remaining common sights on our roads deep into the 1980s.

Back in the United Kingdom, though, vehicles bearing the storied octagon badge continued to be built. Today’s Final Parking Space episode documents one of the very last properly British MGs.

The ZT’s first model year was 2001, so these cars won’t be legal to import to the United States until 2026 at the earliest. I still find discarded MGBs and Midgets on a regular basis in the car graveyards of the United States, but the best means of finding UK-market MGs in their Final Parking Spaces would be to travel to Great Britain and hit one of the two American-style scrapyards over there.

So that’s what I did.

Soon after arriving at London’s Heathrow Airport, I arrived at the rental car lot to acquire wheels (an A-Class saloon) and was presented with vivid evidence that the MG brand still exists. Between a Peugeot and a Fiat (both ancient European manufacturers now owned by Amsterdam-based Stellantis) stood a pair of MG ZSes; indeed, you’ll see new MGs on roads all over Western Europe right now. These machines are built in Asia by Nanjing Automobile, though design and engineering work still takes place in England.

You could make the case that even the ZT doesn’t have full British ancestry, since BMW took over the company very early in the car’s development (you’ll want to read the excellent AROnline article for the full story). However, at the time, the Bavarians were more interested in the car that became the New Mini and so stayed mostly hands-off with the Rover 75 and its ZT descendant, pumping money into the project but leaving the Rover Group engineers and designers to create what turned out to be (arguably) the last of the purely British MGs. In fact, the 75 and ZT were meant to replace the Rover 600/800, which were developed jointly with Honda and contained a great deal of Accord/Legend DNA. I say this car earned its proud Union Jack badges, which now live on my garage wall.

MG had endured a rollercoaster of ownership changes since the Morris Garage built its first cars in 1924. The British Motor Corporation took over in 1952 with the merger of Morris Motors with the Austin Motor Company. In 1966, BMC absorbed Jaguar, then merged with Leyland Motors to become the British Leyland Motor Corporation in 1968. The British government took over in 1975 to create British Leyland, which killed the MG brand (in favor of its deadly intra-corporate rival, Triumph) after 1980 but revived it every so often for badge-engineered cars.

British Leyland begat the Rover Group in 1986, with British Aerospace acquiring the MG brand a couple of years later. BMW bought MG in 1994, then sold it to Phoenix Venture Holdings in 2000; this company built MGs as the MG Rover Group through 2005, at which point Nanjing Automobile gathered up the ruins after a disastrous few months. There’s a lot of history in the junkyard!

The ZT is thus one of very few true MGs from the post-1980 period (again, there’s plenty of room for argument about definitions here, and I’m personally biased, as an American who daily-drove a British Racing Green chrome-bumper MGB-GT while in college). While I’d prefer an MG F to a ZT for myself, the ZT was by most accounts a very good saloon that deserved a much better fate than what it got. Production of ZT-derived cars for the Chinese market continued through the middle-2010s.

U-Pull-It UK is owned by Dallas-based Copart, and their two British facilities are in York and Edinburgh. I visited the York yard, about four hours’ drive north of London and very cold in January. Prices are good and the employees are friendly there. I recommend a visit if you’re in the area.

I shot dozens of interesting vehicles at this yard, as well as at more traditional dismantlers (known as breaker’s yards in England), and I will be writing articles about English scrapyard inmates ranging from a Bentley S3 to an Alfa Romeo Brera S in the near future.

The interior of the MG ZT was comfortable in the traditional British style, with generous helpings of high-quality wood and leather. BMW didn’t want the car to compete too directly with its own 3 Series and 5 Series sedans while the ZT’s Rover 75 ancestor was being developed (hence its size between the two), and MG Rover went all-in on non-German interior design for the ZT.

The engine is a 2.5-liter Rover DOHC V-6, rated at 187 horsepower and 181 pound-feet of torque and giving this car a tested top speed of 140 mph. Versions of this engine came to our side of the Atlantic under the bonnets of Land Rover Freelanders and Kia Sedonas.

The transmission is a five-speed manual, driving the front wheels. A rear-wheel-drive version of the ZT was available as well, made possible by the deep floorpan tunnel, powered by a 4.6-liter Ford Modular V-8.

It began its career driving in Scotland but it will be crushed in England.

U-Pull-It was kind enough to shoot a photo of the gauge cluster with the ignition powered on for their inventory site, so we can see that this car had a mere 97,795 miles at the end. That’s fewer than most of our MGBs have today.

It appears that this car was built a few months before the axe fell on the MG Rover Group. Just 1870 ZTs were built for the 2005 model year, so this car is yet another example of the “historically significant and very rare, yet not worth much” category. You’ll see more of that phenomenon in this series, I feel compelled to warn you.

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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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The Buick Roadmaster name goes back all the way to the 1936 model year, when the Series 80 Roadmaster first hit showrooms. Except for a break during World War II, when the Buick Division built aircraft engines and M18 Hellcat Tank Destroyers, Roadmasters were built from 1936 through 1958. Production resumed for the 1991 through 1996 model years, when Roadmaster sedans and wagons were sold. Perhaps the most majestic of all Roadmasters were the 1949–52 models, long and low with smooth-running straight-eight engines. Here’s one of those cars, which I recently found in a Denver-area self-service car graveyard.

The four VentiPort holes on each front fender mean this is a Roadmaster for sure, since the lowly Supers and Specials got three VentiPorts per side apiece in 1951. Some sources state that the Riviera name was used only for hardtops in ’51, but Buick applied the Riviera designation to all long-wheelbase Roadmasters that year, as well as to higher-end Specials and Supers. The Riviera name would eventually be applied to many Buicks, but it didn’t become a model name in its own right until 1963.

The firewall body tag is long gone, but the first digit of the serial number on the door pillar shows that this car was built at Fairfax Assembly in Kansas City, just 600 miles to the east of this car’s Final Parking Space.

Many American manufacturers installed straight-eight engines in their cars during the 1920s through 1950s, but most of those were flathead designs. Notable exceptions include the wild overhead-cam straight-eights that went into Duesenbergs and, of course, the overhead-valve Buick straight-eight.

This one displaces 320 cubic inches (5.2 liters) and was rated at 152 horsepower. That was respectable for the early 1950s, but the introduction of the groundbreaking Oldsmobile and Cadillac overhead-valve V-8s for the 1949 model year made the Buick Eight seem antiquated to car shoppers, who were then marveling at supersonic rocket planes and the inauguration of a nuclear arms race with the Soviets.

The Buick Division would get its own V-8 engine starting with the 1953 model year, with Chevrolet and Pontiac following with their division-specific pushrod V-8 designs a couple of years later. To be fair to the 1951 Buick, its engine made 17 more horsepower than the Olds 303 Rocket and just eight fewer than Cadillac’s 331. That said, the very first rock ‘n’ roll song ever recorded (by Ike Turner) had as its subject matter the 1951 Oldsmobile Rocket 88. How could any inline engine top that?

Despite GM’s spectacular coup with the world’s first truly successful automatic transmission, GM’s Buick Division resisted the Hydra-Matic and ended up with a very smooth but not-so-efficient automatic developed from the powertrain of the M18 Hellcat.

This was the Dynaflow, which sometimes gets called a two-speed but uses its complex torque converter rig to deliver a driving experience more like that of a CVT with two manually selected ranges. This Roadmaster would have been thirsty with its big eight and Dynaflow, but so what? Rolls-Royce didn’t even offer an automatic transmission until 1952, instead using four-on-the-tree manuals to rattle the fillings out of their passengers’ teeth, while Dynaflow-equipped Buicks rolled serene and shift-free.

You would think such a luxurious postwar machine wouldn’t have met this fate, but it spent too many years outdoors in the harsh Colorado High Plains climate to be an economically sensible restoration. Its parts will live on in other Roadmasters.

The adobe-like layers of body filler could be hiding unseen rust, but plenty of usable body and trim parts await junkyard shoppers.

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The post Final Parking Space: 1951 Buick Roadmaster Riviera Sedan appeared first on Hagerty Media.

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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The post Final Parking Space: 1988 Plymouth Horizon America appeared first on Hagerty Media.

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.

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

Welcome to this, the first installment of the “Final Parking Space” series! My car graveyard travels take me all over the country as I explore salvage yards and explore the history of forgotten vehicles. Today’s FPS car, however, resides in my home state of Colorado—at a venerable family-owned yard just south of the Denver city limits. It’s a fine example of affordable full-size Detroit luxury from the early 1960s: a 1963 Chrysler Newport sedan.

Chrysler first started using the Newport name on hardtop models during the 1950s, then made the Newport a model name in its own right starting with the 1961 model year.

From that year until Chrysler axed the Newport in 1978, it was the cheapest full-sized Chrysler model available. For 1963, it occupied a spot on the big Chrysler prestige ziggurat below the 300 and the New Yorker.

The MSRP for this car started at $2964, or about $29,937 in 2023 dollars. The Chrysler 300 sedan listed at $3765 ($38,028 after inflation) that year, while the mighty New Yorker sedan cost $3981 ($40,210 now). That made the Newport a steal when looked at in car-per-dollar terms; the decidedly proletariat 1963 Chevrolet Impala sedan with V-8 engine started at $2768 ($27,958 in today’s money).

The Newport post sedan was by far the best-selling Chrysler-badged car of 1963, with 49,067 sold that year. The New Yorker sedan came in second place, with a mere 14,884 rolling out of showrooms.

Under the hood, we find a genuine Chrysler big-block V-8 engine: a two-barrel 361 rated at 265 horsepower. This is a B engine, a member of the family introduced in 1958 and the ancestor of the legendary RB engines that included the 383, 413, 426 (no, not the 426 Hemi) and 440. If you bought the 300 for ’63, you got a 383 with 305 horses, while the New Yorker came with a 413 and an impressive 340 hp. The King of Chrysler Power in 1963 was the rare 300J coupe, which had a twin-four-barrel-equipped 413 that made 390 horsepower. Keep in mind that these are gross, not net ratings, and that there was a certain amount of exaggeration in the automotive marketing world back then.

The transmission here is a three-speed automatic with Chrysler’s distinctive push-button shifter on the dash. The base transmission in the 1963 Newport was a three-speed column-shift manual, however, so the original buyer of this car paid extra for luxurious two-pedal driving.

The factory AM radio has the CONELRAD nuclear-attack-alert frequencies of 640 and 1240 kHz marked with Civil Defense triangles on the dash. Car radios sold in the United States were required to have these markings after 1963, at which time it was presumed that the speed of Soviet ICBMs would render such a system irrelevant.

It’s not terribly rusty and the interior could be revived without too much trouble. So why is it here? Sadly, non-hardtop Detroit sedans of the 1946-1970 period just aren’t worth enough for almost anybody to justify a serious restoration of a car in this condition.

A good message to keep in mind.

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The post Final Parking Space: 1963 Chrysler Newport 4-Door Sedan appeared first on Hagerty Media.