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Author: Murilee Martin

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1960s, amc, American Motors, Automotive History, Classics, Convertible, convertibles, Junkyard, Junkyard Gems, Luxury, music, Wisconsin

Junkyard Gem: 1965 Rambler Ambassador 990 Convertible


By the middle 1960s, George Romney had left the helm of American Motors to become governor of Michigan and company president Roy Abernethy had decided that AMC needed to compete more directly against GM, Ford and Chrysler. In order for the Kenosha manufacturer formed from the 1954 merger of Nash and Hudson to do that, a genuine full-size car had to be created to steal sales from the Impala, Galaxie and Monaco. With a wheelbase stretch and a restyling by Dick Teague, the Rambler Ambassador became that car for the 1965 model year. Here’s a once-snazzy soft-top Ambassador from that year, found at a family-owned yard just south of the Denver city limits.

I’ve documented quite a few vintage machines at Colorado Auto & Parts in this series over the past year, including a 1954 Plymouth Belvedere, a 1969 Walker Power Truck, a 1974 Ford F-250, a 1960 Triumph TR3A, a 1947 Dodge Custom Club Coupe, a 1969 AMC Rambler 440, a 1951 Studebaker Champion, a 1959 Princess DM4 limousine and a couple of dozen first-generation Mustangs and Cougars. This Ambassador is now parked between a Chevelle and a Mustang.

The Ambassador 990 convertible wasn’t the most expensive new ’65 Rambler you could buy, because the Ambassador wagon and the sporty new Marlin cost a bit more. Still, its $2,955 price tag ($29,907 in 2024 dollars) was on the steep side for Rambler shoppers accustomed to penny-pinching Classics and Americans.

This car would have cost much more than the base MSRP, though, because it was built with AMC’s biggest car engine at the time: a 327-cubic-inch V8 rated at 250 horsepower. No, it’s not related to the Chevrolet 327 small-block; parts-counter staffers spent many decades dealing with that confusing name mixup (to be fair to AMC, their 327 was first).

Kaiser-Jeep, not yet purchased by AMC, bought AMC 327s for use in its trucks during the mid-to-late 1960s and called them 327 Vigilantes.

The base engine in the 1965 Ambassador was the 232-cubic-inch “Torque-Command” straight-six, the 4.0-liter descendants of which were still being bolted into new Jeep Wranglers in 2006.

The base transmission in the 1965 Ambassador was a three-speed column-shift manual, but this car has the optional three-speed automatic with “Flash-O-Matic” shifter on the center console. If you wanted a factory radio in your new ’65 Ambassador, you could add “Duo-Coustic” or “Vibra-Tone” rear speakers.

AMC sold just under 65,000 Ambassadors for the 1965 model year, including wagons. Meanwhile, Chevrolet sold better than a million of its full-size Biscaynes, Bel Airs and Impalas that year (and GM’s Pontiac, Oldsmobile and Buick sold plenty of their own versions of those cars as well). As for Ford and Chrysler, there’s no need to rub it in by listing their vast sales numbers for big cars that year. The Ambassador wasn’t much bigger than the competition’s midsize cars at the time, which was a factor in its slow sales.

American Motors had its ups and downs after 1965, but the general story arc was that the Detroit Big Three used their greater resources to continue grinding down their Wisconsin competitor until Chrysler finally bought what was left in 1987.

The last model year for the Rambler marque was 1968, after which all of AMC’s U.S.-market cars got American Motors Corporation badging. The Rambler name lived on for one more year, as the model name on the former Rambler American for 1969: the AMC Rambler.

This car would be worth decent money if restored, but the body is on the rusty side and the interior has been exposed to the elements for many years, making such a restoration a very costly proposition.

The “Sensible Spectaculars” advertising campaign was on the puzzling side.



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1990s, Automotive History, Classics, Economy Cars, Ford, Junkyard, Junkyard Gems, manual, Manual Transmission, manual transmissions, music, station wagon, Wagon, Wagons

Junkyard Gem: 1993 Ford Escort LX Wagon


The original North American Ford Escort was based (somewhat loosely) on its European cousin and was sold from the 1981 through 1990 model years. After that, the mighty Ford Empire turned to its Japanese ally, Mazda, for the Escort’s platform and that’s where it remained until the final ZX2 Escort coupes were sold here as 2003 models. I’ve neglected those early Mazda-based Escorts in this series up until now, so here’s one found in a Colorado car graveyard recently.

The U.S.-market Escort was available in wagon form from 1981 through 1999 model years. For 1993, the Escort wagon came only with the LX trim level and its MSRP was $10,367 (about $22,795 in 2024 dollars). It appears that this one started out at a dealership just outside of Kansas City.

A 1993 non-wagon Escort buyer getting the LX-E or GT models got a 1.8-liter DOHC Mazda four-cylinder rated at 127 horsepower, while all the other American Escorts that year came with this 1.9-liter Ford CVH and its 88 horses.

Wagons deserve manual transmissions, and that’s what this car has. A four-speed automatic was available in several option packages or as a standalone purchase for $732 ($1,610 after inflation).

This car was a platform sibling to the Mazda 323 aka Protegé, which made it a close cousin to the 1991-1994 Mercury Capri. Its Mercury-badged twin was the Tracer.

Station wagons were on their way out of favor with American consumers in 1993, nearly a decade after the first Chrysler minivans and Jeep XJ Cherokees appeared, two years after the debut of the Ford Explorer and the model year of the first Jeep Grand Cherokees. Three years later, the Toyota RAV4 showed up in the United States, followed by the Honda CR-V a year after that, ensuring that Escort-sized wagons didn’t have much longer to live on showroom floors.

This deeply offensive bumper sticker was the creation of the late Frank T. Kostecki, an Ohio fur trapper and businessman who owned Kosky’s Trading Post in Sullivan and offered a full line of stickers promoting the consumption of roadkill possum.

Ford still hadn’t gone to six-digit odometers on the Escort by the time this one was built, so we can’t know its final mileage total.

Your friendly Northwest Ford dealer would toss in air conditioning, AM/FM stereo and a luggage rack at no extra cost!



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1990s, Automotive History, Cadillac, Classics, Junkyard, Junkyard Gems, Luxury, luxury sedan, music, Sedan, South Carolina, Special and Limited Editions, Special Edition, special editions

Junkyard Gem: 1998 Cadillac DeVille Tuxedo Collection


Cadillac began using the de Ville name (which means about the same thing as “town car” but is more French and thus classier) in the late 1940s, becoming a model name in its own right for the 1959 model year. The seventh generation of the Cadillac de Ville was sold for the 1994 through 1999 model years, and many of these cars received dealer-installed aftermarket packages to increase their general opulence. Here’s one of those cars, with the E&G Classics “Tuxedo Collection” treatment applied, found in a South Carolina car graveyard a few rows away from a Toyota Avalon with nearly a million miles on its odometer.

Cadillac went through many variations of this model name over the decades, including de Ville, De Ville, DeVille and Deville. For most of the 1959-1993 period, the two-doors were named some version of “Coupe de Ville” while the “Sedan de Ville” name went on four-doors. The two-door was dropped after 1993 and eventually the model ended up being simply the DeVille. After the DeVille name itself got the axe in 2005, production of what amounted to the same car continued with DTS badging through 2011.

The 1994-1999 DeVille lived on the same platform as the front-wheel-drive Seville, after a decade of being a cousin to the Buick Park Avenue and Oldsmobile 98. It weighed just a hair over two tons.

For 1994 and 1995, the DeVille was powered by the 4.9-liter version of the pushrod Cadillac High Technology V8 engine, then received the DOHC Northstar V8 until the final DTSs were sold as 2011 models. This one is a 4.6-liter rated at 275 horsepower and 300 pound-feet.

Padded roofs, landau or otherwise, had fallen out of mainstream car-shopper favor by the late 1990s, and even the Brougham name had been dumped by Cadillac by that time (as far as I can tell, the final Brougham-badged car available in the world was the early-2000s Nissan Cedric VIP Brougham). That’s where Cadillac dealers stepped in, and Washington D.C.-area-based E&G Classics provided a Tuxedo Collection by E&G kit for those dealers to install.

E&G wasn’t the only outfit providing such services for dealers selling seventh-generation Cadillac DeVilles; I found a 1995 Sedan DeVille St. Tropez Edition, featuring non-padded landau roof and special badging, a few months ago in Denver.

Both today’s Junkyard Gem and the St. Tropez DeVille were sold out of Don Massey’s mighty Cadillac empire.

The E&G Tuxedo Collection DeVille got this body-color grille.

The heyday of the full padded vinyl roof for Detroit was the 1970s, and owners of the E&G Tuxedo Collection DeVille were able to flaunt their style in true 1979 fashion.

You’ll find one in every car. You’ll see.

The average age of Cadillac buyers plummeted the following model year, when the Yukon Denali-derived Escalade hit showrooms.



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2000s, Automotive History, Classics, Convertible, Foreign Makes, Junkyard, Junkyard Gems, mg, mg roadster, mg tf, music

Scrapyard Gem: 2003 MG TF


When I went on a whirlwind four-day trip to visit the car graveyards of Yorkshire, England, a few months ago, the MG F/TF was near the top of my list of cars to shoot. As it turned out, I found just a single example, at the York U-Pull-It. It was in rough shape, but it’s a discarded example of the very last gas-powered two-seat roadster to bear MG’s storied octagon badge and thus a true Junkyard Scrapyard Gem.

I’d seen a nice British Racing Green MG F at the “MG — 100 Years of Motoring & Passion” exhibit at Le Convervatoire National de Véhicules Historiques in Diekirch, Luxembourg, last fall and got to thinking about the fact that the Fs and early TFs are now legal to import to the United States under the federal 25-year rule. I spent a good chunk of my college years with a 1973 MGB-GT as my daily driver (British Racing Green, of course) and maybe an F/TF would be a fun car to own here. Then sanity returned when I remembered I don’t have room for both an F/TF and my future Mitsuoka Le Seyde.

The very protracted development of the project that became the MG F began in 1984, when the MG brand was owned by the Austin Rover division of British Leyland. Fast-forward to 1994, when BMW bought the Rover Group from British Aerospace (we’re skipping an Imperial ton of convoluted British car-industry history here, because we’re into the whole brevity thing) and that fresh infusion of Bavarian cash meant that the MG F actually became showroom reality as a 1995 model.

BMW sold MG in 2000; it became part of the Nanjing Automobile empire in 2005 and still exists today. For the 2002 model year, MG Rover restyled the F and gave it a non-Hydragas suspension, naming it the TF in the process.

I was able to find an example of one of the very last thoroughly British MGs, a 2005 ZT 190, a few rows away in the same yard. Also documented by me at the York U-Pull-It that day were a Ford StreetKa, a SEAT Altea, a Smart ForFour, an ex-Royal Mail Peugeot Bipper, a Peugeot 307CC, a Citroën C4 Picasso, a Citroën Xsara Picasso Desire, an early Honda HR-V, a Mitsubishi i, a Renault Megane CC, a Saab 96, a 2007 Mitsubishi Colt, a BMW 320td and an Alfa Romeo Giulietta.

This TF was crashed and thoroughly picked over, but it was identifiable.

The TF was powered by Rover K-series straight-four engines of either 1.6 or 1.8 liters’ displacement, mid-mounted and driving the rear wheels. It’s essentially a British MR2 Spyder, but without the staid Toyota image. This car has the base five-speed manual; a CVT was available as an option.

You can get great deals on MG TFs in the U.K. right now, with prices ranging from the low hundreds of pounds on up to asking prices approaching £10,000.

British production of the TF ceased when MG Rover went bust in 2005, but Nanjing Automobile Group restarted production in China two years later and continued building TFs through 2011.

What’s not to like about the TF? Other than the imminent demise of its manufacturer, that is.

Because of charisma… the heart is different.



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1960s, Automotive History, Classics, GM, hardtop, Junkyard, Junkyard Gems, Luxury, music, Oldsmobile, Sedan, Sedans

Junkyard Gem: 1968 Oldsmobile Delta 88 Custom Holiday Sedan


The 1965-1970 version of GM’s full-size B Platform was one of The General’s greatest successes, underpinning nearly 13 million cars. Each of the U.S.-market GM car divisions (except Cadillac) had their own B-Bodies during those model years, from the proletarian Chevrolet Biscayne on up to the opulent Buick Wildcat. Doing business just one small rung below Buick on the GM “Ladder of Success” in 1968 was the Oldsmobile Division, and the king of Olds B-Bodies that year was the Delta 88 Custom Holiday Sedan four-door hardtop. Today’s Junkyard Gem is one of those cars, found in a Denver self-service yard last winter.

The prestige lines between the GM divisions were starting to get a bit blurry by the late 1960s, when car shoppers could get a Chevy Caprice with a list price higher than that of an Olds Delmont 88 and then option it up to cost more than a Buick LeSabre. At the end of the day, though, your neighbors in 1968 would still have known that an Oldsmobile carried more swank than its Chevy or Pontiac siblings, and that the owner of a Buick could look down his nose at an Olds driver.

However, most GM cars in 1968 were still powered by engines made by their own divisions, in those pleasant days before the “Chevymobile” lawsuits (if they had V8s, at least). That meant that when you bought an Olds 88 that year, it came with a genuine Rocket V8 engine under its hood. In this case, the engine is a monstrous Quadrajet-fed 455-cubic-inch (7.5-liter) Rocket rated at 365 horsepower and an awe-inspiring 510 pound-feet. The ’68 Olds Toronado came with an even hairier 455 that made 400 horses, by the way.

Yes, those are gross power numbers and not the more realistic net numbers we’ve been using since the early 1970s, but this was one respectably quick 4,155-pound car for its era. A buyer of a 1968 full-size Chevrolet could get a wild 427-cube big-block V8 with 425 horses as a (very expensive) option, but even Buick’s 430 couldn’t beat the Delta 88’s torque (that changed two years later with the introduction of the 510-pound-foot Buick 455).

Naturally, this car required premium gasoline and probably never saw double-digit fuel economy at any time, but few Oldsmobile shoppers cared about that until certain geopolitical events took place in 1973. If you bought the 1968 Delta 88 with the base three-on-the-tree manual transmission — that’s right, you had to pay extra for an automatic even on a snazzy machine like this — you could get a 310hp 455 that would run on regular gas.

Speaking of options, this car has a bunch that would have pushed its out-the-door cost well above its MSRP of $3,721 (about $34,214 in 2024 dollars). The four-barrel 455 cost $57 ($524 today), the three-speed automatic transmission cost $158 ($1,453), the power steering was $98 ($901), the air conditioning was a heroic $411 ($3,779) and … you get the idea.

The original buyer of this car wanted it loaded, so it even has the optional power windows.

Oldsmobile became very enthusiastic about borrowing names from American fighter jets during the 1950s and 1960s, and the Delta series was inspired by the moniker of the F-102 Delta Dagger. The Cutlass borrowed its name from the F7U Cutlass naval fighter as well, with the Starfire paying homage to the F-94 Starfire. Apparently, Convair, Vought and Lockheed chose not to make a legal stink about their product names being appropriated by a car company for its products, perhaps because that car company was one of the most powerful corporations in the country at that time. In any case, the F-102 suffered from huge cost overruns during its development, the F-94 was obsolete soon after entering service and the F7U was a dangerous, overcomplicated lemon known as “the Gutless Cutlass.” There’s a lot of history in the junkyard, if you know where to look!

Speaking of aviation history, the build tag tells us that this car was built at GM’s original Fairfax Assembly in Kansas City. That’s where North American Aviation built B-25 Mitchell bombers during World War II, selling it to The General in 1945. F-84F Thunderstreaks were assembled alongside cars there by GM during the early 1950s.

Worth restoring? It’s not rusty, but the interior is bad and even hardtop four-doors of this era don’t get the enthusiast love given to two-doors and convertibles.

Oldsmobile for 1968 has something for old and young! 38 years later, the Oldsmobile Division got the axe.



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1990s, Automotive History, Chrysler, Junkyard, Junkyard Gems, minivan, Minivan/Van, minivans, music, Plymouth

Junkyard Gem: 1998 Plymouth Voyager Expresso


For the 1994 Chicago Auto Show, Chrysler brought a Neon-based concept car that looked like something families would drive around the Mars Base in the year 2094. This was the Plymouth Expresso, and you’d never have guessed that the Plymouth Division itself would be terminated just seven years later while gazing at its whimsical shape. As often happens with concept cars, the Expresso’s design itself was a dead end (though some claim it influenced the later Chrysler PT Cruiser), but its name survived… on an option package.

As the 1990s began, Chrysler felt Plymouth remained relevant despite few American car shoppers understanding that the brand was supposed to live below Dodge in the company’s prestige hierarchy. The PT Cruiser originally was planned as a Plymouth, and the Prowler really did start out bearing the badging of the Chrysler division named after a brand of twine popular with 1920s farmers.

The first use of the Expresso name on a Plymouth came in the 1996 model year, when Plymouth Neon and Breeze buyers could get the Expresso Package for $375 (about $762 in 2024 dollars). The reviewer for Edmunds was scathing about “a new transparently-named Expresso package aimed at so-called Generation X buyers who supposedly spend all their time slacking off at the Coffee Plantation sipping java.” By 1998, every single Plymouth model except the Prowler could be Expresso-ized.

Expressos got these rad badges (see: Mercury Tracer Trio), body-colored trim and a halfway decent AM/FM/cassette radio. As a member of Generation X who had just hit age 30 at the time, I had no urge to trade in my 1965 Impala or 1985 CRX for a Plymouth Expresso, but my reaction may have been atypical (it wasn’t).

Under the pitiless rule of DaimlerChrysler, the Plymouth Division suffered indignity after indignity during the late 1990s. Even before the axe fell on Plymouth’s outstretched neck, the Voyager was snatched away and given Chrysler badging. The Prowler stayed a Plymouth through 2001, then spent a single overlooked year as a Chrysler.

As you can see, this Junkyard Gem is more about the Expresso Package and the decline of Plymouth than the Voyager itself, because sometimes junkyard automotive history works that way.

The Voyager was the cheapest of all the Chrysler minivans for 1998, which made it a very strong deal for the money despite the depressingly forced-cheerful Expresso badges. The MSRP for the base 1998 Voyager was $17,995, or about $34,915 in 2024 dollars; its Dodge Caravan sibling started at $20,535 ($39,843 after inflation).

This generation of Chrysler minivan (the third) was sold in the United States for the 1996 through 2000 model years. European minivan shoppers could buy them with Chrysler Voyager and, later on, Lancia Voyager badging.

Get up to $1,000 cash back! Hurry, before Plymouth itself disappears.

Wait, make that up to $2,145 back in “total values.”



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2000s, Automotive History, Classics, Economy Cars, Ford, Junkyard, Junkyard Gems, music, Sedan, Special and Limited Editions, Special Edition, special editions

Junkyard Gem: 2003 Ford Focus ZTS Centennial Edition


The very first car produced by the Ford Motor Company was the 1903 Model A. 100 years later, Ford decided to build some special Centennial Edition cars and trucks. Ford shoppers could get five Centennial Edition models for 2003: the Taurus, Mustang, Explorer, F-250/F-350 and Focus. All were painted black, the only color available for the 1914-1925 Model T. I’ve been searching for a Centennial Edition Ford over many years of junkyard exploration and finally found this Focus in a Denver-area yard.

Some junkyard visitor before me pried off the special fender and decklid badges, but the “two-tone signature Centennial Leather” seats were still there.

Sadly, the special Centennial Edition key chain, hardcover edition of “The Ford Century” book, wristwatch and letter from Bill Ford weren’t inside the car.

This Junkyard Gem is in rough shape, so here’s what it looked like in the sales brochure. The only previous Focus in this series was an ’02 Mach Audio, so we were overdue.

While the Centennial Edition Mustang was available in either coupe or convertible form, all the Centennial Edition Foci were ZTS sedans.

4,000 each of the Centennial Edition Taurus and Explorer were built, with only 3,000 apiece for the Focus, Mustang and F-Series.

100 years is quite a milestone for a car company, but plenty of special-edition cars for other production anniversaries have been built and I’ve documented many of them in car graveyards. There’s the 50th Anniversary Oldsmobile Eighty-Eight (commemorating a half-century of the 88 model), the XC Edition Oldsmobile Ciera (commemorating 90 years of Oldsmobile), the 40th Anniversary Pontiac Grand Prix, the 30th Anniversary Pontiac Grand Am, the 10th Anniversary Black Red Edition Datsun 280ZX, the 50th Anniversary Nissan 300ZX (commemorating 50 years of Nissan), the 25th Anniversary Chevrolet Camaro, the 30th Anniversary Mercury Cougar and many more. It’s too bad Studebaker isn’t around anymore, because 2040 will be the 300th anniversary of the first horse-drawn wagon built by Peter Stutenbecker in the British Province of Maryland.

This being a ZTS, the top-grade 2003 Focus sedan available in the United States, it has the 130-horsepower DOHC Zetec engine.

Its 1903 predecessor had a clutchless two-speed planetary transmission to go with its two-cylinder pushrod boxer engine, but this car has a more modern five-speed manual.

The Focus remained in American Ford showrooms through 2018, then got the axe because “silhouettes are changing.” You can still buy a new Focus elsewhere in the world, though; it’s built on the same platform as the current Maverick.

When some hooptie early-1980s GM sedan tries to spray your new black Focus with no-doubt-contaminated washer fluid, you know what to do.



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1990s, Automotive History, badge engineering, Cadillac, Junkyard, Junkyard Gems, Luxury, music, Opel, Sedan

Junkyard Gem: 1997 Cadillac Catera


GM’s Cadillac Division was having a tough time in the early 1990s, with an onslaught of Lexuses and Infinitis pouring across the Pacific to steal their younger customers while high-end German manufacturers picked off their older customers. Flying an S-Class-priced model between assembly lines in Turin and Hamtramck hadn’t worked out, so why not look to the European outposts of the far-flung GM Empire for the next Cadillac? That’s how the Catera was born, and I have found a rare first-year example in a North Carolina car graveyard.

Across the Atlantic, GM’s Opel and Vauxhall were doing good business with prosperous European car buyers by selling them the sleek rear-wheel-drive Omega B (whose platform also lived beneath the Holden VT Commodore in Australia). Here was a genuine German design that competed with success against BMW and Audi on their home turf!

So, the Omega B was Americanized and renamed the Catera. Opel wasn’t a completely unknown brand to Americans at the time, since its cars were sold here with their own badging through Buick dealerships from the middle 1950s through the late 1970s (for a much shorter period, American Pontiac dealers attempted to sell Vauxhalls). Even after that, plenty of Opel DNA showed up in the products of U.S.-market GM divisions.

The Catera was by far the most affordable Cadillac for 1997, with an MSRP starting at $29,995 (about $59,113 in 2024 dollars). Being a genuine German car, it looked much more convincingly European than the DeVille ($36,995), Eldorado ($37,995) and Seville ($39,995).

Inspired by the ducks on the Cadillac emblem (they were really supposed to be martlets, mythical birds with no feet and occasionally lacking beaks), Cadillac’s marketers went after youthful car shoppers with a whimsical animated duck named Ziggy. For the 21st century, the birds were removed from the Cadillac emblem in order to attract California buyers under 45 years of age.

As we all know, the Catera flopped hard in the marketplace. What sold well in Europe turned out not to translate so well in in North America, especially when bearing the badges of such a historically prestigious brand.

The Catera’s engine was a 54-degree 3.0-liter V6 rated at 200 horsepower and 192 pound-feet.

Just as had been the case with its predecessor, the Allanté, no manual transmission was available.

Americans tend to not maintain their cars as meticulously as their European counterparts, and they drive much longer distances in harsher weather conditions on worse roads, so the Catera proved much less reliable than its Omega counterparts across the ocean.

A Holden-ized version of the Catera’s chassis returned to our shores in 2004, underpinning the Pontiac GTO. This means that LS swaps into Cateras shouldn’t be too difficult…

After 2001, the Catera was gone. However, the suits at Cadillac had learned by then that pasting their badges on the GMC Yukon Denali was like having a license to print money. Rappers were rhyming about the new Cadillac truck, and the under-80 crowd flocked to Cadillac showrooms. During the 2000s, new Cadillac car models (some using members of the Catera’s 54° V6 engine family) continued the Cadillac revival, and the shameful memories of Ziggy faded.

But the junkyard never forgets, so let’s watch some more Catera commercials.

Hey, Cindy Crawford listened to Ziggy the Duck!

Ziggy also worked as a personal trainer.

Isn’t it time you took a test drive?

Wait, Opel says it should survive 10,000 miles of abuse in Arizona.

Those Omega owners sure have fun.

The Vauxhall version had 69 billion possibilities in its security codes, and it was pronounced “OH-muh-guh.”

Just the thing to drive around a surreal desert.



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2000s, Automotive History, Crossover, Economy Cars, Junkyard, Junkyard Gems, music, Suzuki

Junkyard Gem: 2008 Suzuki SX4 Crossover


If you want to find some interesting automotive history in your local Ewe Pullet, finding any U.S.-market Suzuki model and peering into its background will tell you a lot about the global car industry from the middle 1980s through just over a decade ago. The Suzuki tale gets a bit convoluted during the second half of the 2010s here; in recent months, I’ve documented discarded examples of the 2008 XL-7 (derived from the Saturn Vue), the 2008 Reno (based on the final Lacetti designed by pre-GM Daewoo) and the 2009 Equator (a thinly disguised Nissan Frontier). Today’s Junkyard Gem is a second-model-year SX4 Crossover, found in a Colorado Springs car graveyard recently.

Suzuki began selling motorcycles in the United States in 1963 (no, the Suzuki Musical Instrument Manufacturing Company was never affiliated with the Suzuki Motor Company, Suzuki being a very common Japanese family name), but we didn’t get highway-legal Suzuki-built four-wheeled vehicles here until the Chevrolet Sprint showed up as a 1985 model, followed the next year by the Suzuki Samurai. Then the 1990s gave us Geo-badged Suzukis (the Metro and Tracker) as well as their Suzuki-badged siblings (the Swift and Sidekick), plus Esteems, X-90s, Vitaras and Grand Vitaras.

The plotline of American Suzuki story goes through some strange twists and turns during the 2000s, mostly due to Suzuki’s role in the far-flung General Motors Empire and GM’s purchase of Daewoo’s car-building operations. Some Daewoos were sold here with Suzuki badges (the Verona, Reno and Forenza), while only the Vitara, Grand Vitara, XL-7 and Aerio remained as pure Suzuki products by 2006.

The SX4 was the Aerio’s successor and debuted here as a 2007 model. It was available in “tall hatchback” crossover and— a year later— sedan form, both styled by Giorgetto Giugiaro and based on a platform developed in partnership with Fiat. The SX4 name stands for Sport X-over for 4 Seasons, which isn’t quite as tortured an acronym as, say, the ones other Japanese carmakers assigned to hardware such as the Powerful & Economic Lightweight Accurate Silent Mighty Advanced or the Lightweight Advanced Super Response Engine. The American Motors Corporation had already used the SX/4 name on a sporty crossover hatchback for the 1981-1983 model years, but perhaps AMC’s use of a slash character made it seem sufficiently different for Suzuki to use.

Upon its launch, the SX4 Crossover was the cheapest AWD-equipped new car available in the United States, with an MSRP starting at $14,999 for the 2007 model (that’s about $23,234 in 2024 dollars).

Our reviewer thought it was garbage, to put it mildly, stating “if you just gotta have a new all-wheel-drive car and cost is your second biggest concern, go get an SX4.” The “security system” (a red LED blinking on the dashboard) and lack of cargo space displeased him mightily, as did the manual gearshift (which felt like “moving a steel rod around in a bucket of pea gravel”).

This car has the base five-speed manual, in fact, which saved the original purchaser $1,100 on the cost of an automatic ($1,704 after inflation).

The engine is a 2.0-liter straight-four rated at 143 horsepower and 136 pound-feet.

It was an affordable car that could deal with snow and mud while looking somewhat truck-ish, and it hauled people around for 16 years.

Suzuki brought out the pretty decent Kizashi for 2010, but it was too late. The company gave up on selling cars and trucks here for 2013, after which the only new highway-legal Suzukis available here had two wheels apiece. Suzuki still does well selling cars elsewhere, though, with the Hustler reigning at or near the top of the JDM best-seller list for quite a few years.

Just because there’s a gas crisis doesn’t have to mean there’s a fun crisis.

The SX4’s European cousin was called the Fiat Sedici.

Gets good traction even on a violin.

 



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1990s, Automotive History, Classics, geo, Junkyard, Junkyard Gems, music, nummi, Performance, Sedan, Toyota

Junkyard Gem: 1990 Geo Prizm GSi


GM created the Geo brand in order to sell vehicles built and/or designed by its Japanese partners: Suzuki, Isuzu and Toyota. The Geo Prizm was sibling to Toyota’s E90 Sprinter and built at the NUMMI plant in California from the 1990 through 1997 model years (after which it became a Chevrolet through 2002). For 1990 through 1992, a high-performance version of the Prizm called the GSi was available, and I’ve found a rare hatchback version in a Colorado wrecking yard.

Though the Prizm was based on the Corolla-related JDM Toyota Sprinter, it was mechanically identical to same-year Corollas then being sold in the United States (and built on the same assembly line in Fremont). The powertrain in the Prizm GSi is what was bolted into the same-year U.S.-market Corolla GT-S.

In this case, that means a “red top” 4A-GE DOHC 1.6-liter straight-four, rated at 130 horsepower.

A five-speed manual was base equipment, but this car has the optional four-speed automatic.

The hatchback Prizm, which was based on the JDM Sprinter Cielo, was built for just the 1990 and 1991 model years. I’ve found a few Prism GSi notchback sedans during my junkyard travels, but this is the first hatchback version.

NUMMI (New United Motor Manufacturing Incorporated) in the San Francisco Bay Area was GM’s Fremont Assembly plant from 1963 through 1982 prior to becoming a joint Toyota-GM venture in 1984. NUMMI shut down in 2010 after the final Corolla was built there, after which it became the Tesla Factory. I had a warehouse job during the summer of 1989 that involved delivering paint filters to NUMMI, so perhaps I hauled the filters that strained the paint that went on this very car.

This one is well-equipped, with air conditioning and a decent-for-1990 AM/FM/cassette deck boasting Dolby, digital tuning and auto-reverse.

It traveled just short of 175,000 miles during its career, which is pretty good for a car of its era but not very impressive compared to some of the extreme-high-mile junkyard Toyotas I’ve documented. Members of the Corolla family, being cheaper than Camrys, Avalons, Previas and so forth, tend to get thrown away before reaching 300,000 miles (though I’ve found a 322k-mile 1990 Prizm, a 315k-mile 1991 Corolla wagon and a 311k-mile 1996 Corolla sedan in boneyards).

Starting with the 1993 model year, the Prizm became an E100 Sprinter and the GSi version got the axe.

More power than the Civic, a better warranty than the Corolla, cheaper than the BMW 3 Series.

Oldsmobile hired Leonard Nimoy to pitch its futuristic machinery, but Geo got Harlan Ellison.



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