#Junkyard

Fiat-badged cars ceased to be sold in the United States during 1982, not to return until three decades later. Still, there were four Fiat models available here during the first couple of years of the 1980s, including the mid-engined X1/9. Here's one of those cars, found in a car graveyard near Denver recently.

GM began producing cars on its J Platform beginning in 1981, and the J-Body proved to be a tremendous global sales success for The General. Nearly a quarter-century later, the final new J-based cars were sold in the United States. Here's one of those last-year cars, found in a car graveyard in Charlotte, South Carolina.

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

When it comes to junkyard cars with impressively high final odometer numbers, Toyotas, Hondas, Volvos and Mercedes-Benzes seem to be the most likely to have driven better than 400,000 miles during their lives. How about Subaru? Well, today's Junkyard Find is the highest-mile discarded Fuji Heavy Industries product I've ever found.

Volvo sold brick-shaped rear-wheel-drive station wagons in North America beginning in 1968 with the 145 and continuing through the final V90s three decades later. The 700 Series wagons showed up just about in the middle of that era, but tend to be overshadowed by their 245 predecessors today. Today we'll honor the 740 longroof by admiring one that drove past the 400k-mile mark during its career.

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

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

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

When I'm sniffing around in car graveyards and I find a discarded Toyota or Honda with between 300,000 and 400,000 miles, I won't photograph it unless there's something interesting about it beyond just the odometer reading. With Nissan machinery, however, the bar is lower; today's Junkyard Find should make both Yokohama and Smyrna proud.

When we think about rear-wheel-drive Japanese luxury sedans of the early-to-middle 1990s, the Toyota Cressida, Lexus LS 400 and Infiniti Q45 come to mind immediately. Mazda was in that game as well, though, with the all-but-forgotten 929, and I've found one of those rare cars in a Colorado junkyard.

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

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

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

While SUVs and crossovers have become increasingly popular in Western Europe in recent years, compact MPVs have done very well there during the past quarter-century. One model that proved to be a solid showroom hit was the Citroën C4 Picasso, and I documented one of these machines during my recent trip to the scrapyards of Northern England.

What was the cheapest new four-door car available in the United States for the 1992 model year? Not the Subaru Justy, not the Toyota Tercel, not the Hyundai Excel and not the Suzuki Swift. It was today's Junkyard Find!