#JunkyardFind

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 "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!

Special editions! Who doesn't love big Detroit sleds with exclusive badging, say a numbers-matching Phoenix Open Cutlass Supreme or a genuine Frank Sinatra Imperial? Those special editions are even more exclusive when created by a dealership, and that's what we've got for today's Colorado Junkyard Find.

The 1960 model year saw a trio of brand-new compact Detroit cars ( the Corvair, Valiant and Falcon) appear to do battle with increasingly popular small imports. Sales were strong, and the Detroit Big Three plus the Kenosha One got busy preparing midsize cars to slide between the compacts and the full- sizers. Ford's entry was the Fairlane, which debuted as a 1962 model. Here's one of those first-generation Fairlanes, found in a self-service boneyard just south of Denver, Colorado.

I took a four-day trip to Northern England a couple of weeks ago, primarily to visit one of the only American-style self-service junkyards in the UK. While there, I also dropped by quite a few traditional dismantlers (known as "breaker's yards" over there), and one of them was Sherburn Motor Spares in Leeds, a business specializing in Italian and French vehicles. While there, I found a special-edition Alfa Romeo that never made it to our side of the Atlantic: a UK-only Brera S, hot-rodded by Prodrive.

Last week, I joined fellow car writer Andrew Ganz on a four-day trip to Northern England, with one of Great Britain's two Ewe Pullet-style self-service junkyards as our primary destination. This was the U-Pull-It in York, and today's Junkyard Scrapyard Find is one of the more interesting products of the Société Européene de Véhicules Légers during the 2000s.

Lee Iacocca's Chrysler Corporation sold K-Cars in the United States for the 1981 through 1989 model years, saving itself from near-certain bankruptcy in the process. These cars are becoming difficult to find in the Ewe Pullets of the land, and I hadn't written about a true K in the Junkyard Finds series since way back in 2019. Today, we'll look at a K sedan that survived 36 years before being retired in California.

Out of all the eight generations of Chevrolet Corvette production, the biggest success in the showrooms was the 1968-1982 C3. The C3 looked wild and boasted Jimi Hendrix and Joan Didion provenance, but it handled like a truck and power numbers were grim once the Malaise Era took hold. The General decided he'd be wise to make its C4 successor a cornerin' and brakin' machine, and today's Junkyard Find is a first-year C4 discovered in a Northern California car graveyard last year.