Junkyard Find: A 1993 Honda Civic DX Sedan With 323,486 Miles
Published: October 29th, 2018
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As the owner of a very battered fifth-generation Honda Civic, I’m always aware of examples of Honda’s 1992-1995 subcompact when I spot them during my junkyard travels. I see plenty of these cars with odometers showing better than 300,000 miles, but it has taken a frighteningly wretched-looking one to get me to whip out my camera while on a junkyard-photographing mission.On a recent trip to grab a heater-temperature control knob for my car (lost in my garage clutter when I removed the dash during an ill-advised engine-swap-related rewiring job), I found this used-up ’93 sedan and decided that this high-mile veteran ought to be documented before it heads to The Crusher.
Apart from the fragile head gasket (never overheat a Honda D or B engine) and a tendency to dissolve in rust-prone regions, the fifth-generation Civic was one of the most reliable motor vehicles ever sold. Nearly all the examples I see in junkyards have more than 200,000 miles on the clock. I’m sure most junkyard 1970s and 1980s diesel Mercedes-Benzes racked up even more miles, but most of the ones I find have five-digit odometers or missing instrument clusters.
The sturdy D15B7 engine, rated at 103 horsepower. You have to spin the hell out of the this non-VTEC engine to get moving, and even then you won’t go very quickly. My trouble-free 200k-plus-mile D15B7 now sits on the garage floor, awaiting donation to a 24 Hours of Lemons Civic team that will kill it within hours.
Turn-signal light getting a little rattly? Spray foam to the rescue!
There’s some rust here, nothing too terrible but enough to knock the few remaining dollars out of this car’s potential resale value.
Members of the fast-n-furious Civic-modder crowd prefer the hatchbacks for some reason, so there wasn’t much chance that one of the vape-and-big-eBay-turbo group would rescue this sedan.
This is the exact same industrial-gray interior found in my car. Actually, it’s nicer than the interior in my car.
I pulled the knob off the temperature slider, shot my last photograph of this car, and abandoned it to its fate.
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In Japan, Jodie Foster helped move these cars off the showroom floor.
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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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Thanks for the Jodi Foster videos. At 3:04, it could have easily been a Mentos commercial.
I just purchased a running rolling,unmolested 93 DX w/ 299 on the clock. Drove it home,and have been driving it for the last three days. ...o,and I paid 3 bills for it