#1988

I stand firm in my belief that the first-gen Hyundai Excel was the worst automobile available in America during the last quarter of the 20th century, and that includes the wretched Yugo GV (if the Austin Rover Group had imported the Metro to these shores, however, the Excel might have been knocked from its dubious pedestal). You don’t see these cars on the street, and they’re very rare in junkyards, but I’ve managed to find three of the things this year.

Because the factory-hot-rod FX-16 version of the AE82 Corolla held its value better than the non-GT-S version, you tend to see more of the FX-16s in junkyards these days. In fact, this is the first one of these I’ve seen with an 8-valve engine for several years.

Because I have some friends who race a Quantum Syncro, I’ve been keeping my eyes open for junkyard parts sources. After several years (including two of them in a state that has more weird four-wheel-drive vehicles than any other), I’ve finally found one!

The Buick Reatta is one of the many GM cars of its era that didn’t make a lot of marketing sense; the average age of Buick buyers in the late 1980s was about 113, and that’s not a demographic whose members tend to be comfortable with low-slung two-seaters full of intimidatingly futuristic electronic devices. You still see Reattas on the street now and then, and I found an ’89 in a Los Angeles junkyard last year. Here’s one that I spotted last week in a Denver self-serve yard.

I admit it: I’m suffering from a silly infatuation with Broughamness. Every American car manufacturer (and a few Japanese ones) slapped Brougham emblems on a wide variety of vehicles during the Brougham Era, which we’ll call 1968 through 1992, and the last hurrah for Detroit Broughams was the car that I found in a Denver self-serve wrecking yard yesterday.

The Mitsubishi Starion and its badge-engineered Dodge Conquest TSi twin were more quintessentially 1980s than neon-colored leg warmers and regulatory fiascos, combined. You had your gloriously ridiculous Japanese-macho lines, bright red interior, and TURBO emblems everywhere you looked. The Starion/Conquest was quick, too, with a big turbocharged Astron four-cylinder engine. Only problem was, the Starion/Conquest was a finicky, fragile machine, best known for maddeningly undiagnosable fuel-system problems, weird electrical-system woes, and general flakiness. Many are tempted by Starion projects, but eventually most of those MitsuDodges sitting under tarps in driveways will end up in The Crusher’s waiting room, as this Denver example has done.

Remember the rear-window louver craze? Thanks to the large numbers of Daytonas and Lasers that clung to life long enough to enter junkyards in this second decade of the 21st century, we can relive the Louver Era!

When a truck gets turned into a band’s wretched gig-rig, you know it’s on its last owner prior to entering The Crusher’s waiting room. The same can be said about any car owned by Juggalos. Likewise, when a bunch of Denver/Boulder skater/snowboarder dudes get hold of a cargo van, that’s the end of the line. Here’s a thoroughly used-up Chevy G20 van that I spotted at a Denver self-service yard earlier in the week.

During the late 1980s, my future wife spent several years teaching English in northern China. Back then, many Chinese manufacturers felt that showing off Western-language brand labels indicated worldliness, and so this Chengdu passenger van got a “CD” grille ornament and some somewhat garbled lettering above.

This ’84 Plymouth Colt Turbo caught my junkyard weather eye instantly, because early-to-mid-80s turbo econoboxes are always interesting. Then I realized that you hardly ever see regular fifth-gen Colts, on the street or in the junkyard these days, though they were once among the most commonplace subcompacts on American roads. After that, I kept my eyes open for Crusher-bound naturally-aspirated 1984-88 Colts, finally spotting this one.

Why does TTAC roll its eyes at every proclamation of change, rebirth and renewal from automakers, particularly of the Detroit-based variety? To put it in a single French phrase, dèjá vu. In an industry as cyclical as the automaking game, the latest downturn always takes place within recent memory of the last downturn. As a result, the promises of reinvention and renewed focus are still ringing in our ears by the time each new PR offensive rolls out. One can only hear so many pleas and promises before they all start running together, creating the permanent, inescapable sense that we’ve been here before and it didn’t work out. No better evidence for this phenomenon exists than this series of videos from the 1988 edition of GM’s perennial campaign of renewal (especially in part two). The music may have changed, but the beat goes on.