Junkyard Find: 1988 Plymouth Colt Premier Sedan

Murilee Martin
by Murilee Martin

We see the occasional Colt hatchback in this series— say, this ’84 Plymouth Colt Turbo or this ’88 Dodge Colt hatchback— but the Colt sedan is stop-the-presses rare by Junkyard Find standards. Chrysler called this car the Premier, and it’s full of unusual-for-a-badge-engineered-econobox options.


Of course, we can’t talk about the Colt without watching this Redd Foxx Colt .45 ad, featuring a much earlier version of the car.

Just over 155,000 miles on the clock.

This seat seems to have manual adjustment controls, so what’s the joystick for?

Nine-band equalizers were considered essential to a quality cassette experience in the late 1980s.

Premier!







Murilee Martin
Murilee Martin

Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.

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  • Sector 5 Sector 5 on Dec 05, 2013

    Mitsu were a welcome improvement on Renault at the pentagon and beneath most peoples radar. I recall folks like Nissan were offering standard 60 bumper and 80 powertrain which Archie's mopers wouldn't compete with. Warranty wars were on and I think Colt lost to it.

  • -Nate -Nate on Dec 10, 2013

    Whilst walking my favorite local Pick-A-Part Saturday , I spotted a very clean 197? Dodge Colt , 63,000 miles , the near prefect interior and overall lack of dents etc. made it look like an old man's forgotten car . Even the FUGLY original hubcaps were still on it . -Nate

  • DungBeetle62 For where we're at in the product cycle, I think there are bigger changes afoot. With this generation debuting in 2018, and the Avalon gone, is the next ES to be Crown based? That'll be an interesting aesthetic leap.
  • Philip Precht When Cadillac stopped building luxury cars, with luxury looks, that is when they started their downward spiral. Now, they just look like Chevrolet knock-offs, not much luxury, no luxurious looks. Interiors are just generic. Nothing what they used to look like. Why should someone spend $80,000 on a Cadillac when they can spend a LOT less and get a comparable looking Chevrolet????
  • Ajla A time machine.
  • 28-Cars-Later This question has been posed many times and we discussed it in depth around the time of the ATS and JdN. Then GM had 933 dealers left over from its glory days and ATS was intended to be volume lease fodder for all of those dealer customers. But of course the problem there is channel stuffed junk worked against the image they ostensibly were trying to create when they threatened products like Escala (and the image they thought they were creating with ELR). Cadillac had two choices in my view at the time, either drop 2/3rds of the dealers and focus on truly bespoke low volume product or abandon the pretense of exclusive/bespoke and build high volume models as they had essentially been doing since the last 1960s. Ten years on the choice they made was obvious, hence XT everything... XT an acronym for Xerox This when pointing at Chevrolets and Buicks.There's no "saving" a marque which doesn't wish to be saved. In the next major financial crisis Buick may be folded or consolidated into Chevrolet but Cadiwrack will just become a wrapper over whatever Chinesium infused junk the new openly owner/controlled SAIC GM wants it to be. Cadillac been gone for a long, long time.
  • Kjhkjlhkjhkljh kljhjkhjklhkjh you cant. the younger buyers do not want Cadillac's .. Older buyers want toyotas, lexus and of all things subarus ... all in SUV form
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