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Junkyard Find: 1980 Fiat 124 Sport Spider
In all my years of snouting around in junkyards, one thing has remained constant: a sprinkling of Fiat 124 Sport Spiders. They were fairly common in junkyards in 1983, and they’re just about as common...
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Junkyard Find: 1980 Fiat X1/9
In 1980, Fiat shoppers had the choice of two affordable sports cars: the 124 Sport Spider (examples of which remain quite common in wrecking yards, and the X1/9. The mid-engined X1/9 featured 128...
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Junkyard Find: 1980 AMC Eagle Coupe
The AMC Eagle must have sold better in Colorado than in any other part of the world, because I see so many of the things in Denver junkyards that I don’t even bother photographing most of them. This...
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Junkyard Find: 1980 Buick Skylark Limited
It took just eight years for the Buick Skylark to go from a big, rear-drive, credibly luxurious and status-enhancing machine to front-wheel-drive compact based on the unspeakably terrible Chevy...
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Junkyard Find: 1980 Honda Accord Sedan
We saw a historically interesting but marketplace-irrelevant 1991 Honda Accord wagon Junkyard Find last week, which means that it’s now time to look at the car that made Honda in North America: the...
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Junkyard Find: 1980 Mazda RX-7, with Incredibly 80s Custom Paint
First-generation RX-7s aren’t uncommon Junkyard Finds, even though the youngest ones are 27 years old now. However, not many full-on early-to-mid-80s custom paint jobs show up at junkyards these days....
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Junkyard Find: 1980 Mercedes-Benz 450SL
The Mercedes-Benz R107 is one of those cars that often has a vast difference between the typical perceived value and the typical price you can get when you try to sell one. I’ve seen plenty of these...
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Junkyard Find: 1980 Toyota Corolla Tercel
Because the Corolla had become such a hit in the United States during the early part of the Malaise Era, Toyota decided to confuse car buyers and parts-counter guys for eternity by adding the Corolla...
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Junkyard Find: 1980 Datsun 720 King Cab 4WD Pickup
I see a lot of old, totally used-up Toyota and Datsun pickups in self-service wrecking yards (though any of these newer than about 1984 is a rare sight), so it takes a fairly special one to make me...
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Junkyard Find: 1980 Chrysler Cordoba
It seems strange, but sufficient Chrysler Cordobas still exist to provide a sporadic flow of fresh examples to self-serve wrecking yards. In this series, we’ve seen this ’78, another ’78, this ’79, and...
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Hey Duke, Ever Worked On One-a-Dese Choiman Transmissions Before?
It wasn’t that many decades ago that imported cars— any imported cars— were considered fairly exotic. I’ve dredged up memories of some very funny 1980 Aamco ads that deal with that subject, and the...
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Junkyard Find: 1980 Mazda B2000 Sundowner Pickup
Back in the Middle Malaise Era, most of the B-series Mazda pickups you saw in North America were badged as Ford Couriers, and of course we’ve found the occasional junkyard-dwelling Courier. Still, some...
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Junkyard Find: 1980 Ford Fairmont Futura
The Fairmont was the Fox platform-based cheap midsize Ford that replaced the Maverick, and nobody ever paid much attention to the Fairmont sedans. However, the sporty coupe version of the Fairmont— the...
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Junkyard Find: 1980 Volvo 262C Bertone Coupe
Only 6,622 Volvo 262C Bertone Coupes were built during the Italo-Swedish machine’s 1978-1981 production run, and I’ve found two of them in California self-serve wrecking yards during the last year. We...
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Junkyard Find: 1980 Volkswagen Dasher Diesel
The original Volkswagen Passat, which was essentially an Audi 80, was sold in the United States as the Dasher. We saw this two-door diesel Dasher at a Northern California wrecking yard last year, then...
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Junkyard Find: 1980 Fiat 124 Sport Spider
Will the steady procession of Fiat 124 Spiders into America’s self-service wrecking yards never cease? So far in this series, we’ve seen this ’71, this ’73, this ’75, this ’76, this ’78, this ’80, this...
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Junkyard Find: 1989 Nissan Pulsar NX
The Nissan Pulsar NX was a weird little two-seater sold in the US market for the 1983 through 1990 model years. Now, the coolest thing about the Pulsar NX was the Sportbak wagon-conversion option,...
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Junkyard Find: 1980 Volkswagen Dasher Four-Door Hatchback
With the 1986 Quantum GL5 Junkyard Find we had a couple of days ago, we might as well make this a VW junkyard week. With that in mind, I present this icky-looking Volkswagen Dasher today. I shot this...
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Theft Alert: 1980 Toyota Celica Supra MkI Curbside Classic
This 1980 Toyota Celica Supra Mark 1 – previously featured as a Curbside Classic right here on TTAC – has been stolen in Eugene, Oregon. Let’s help its rightful owners get it back. This single-family,...
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Junkyard Find: 1981 Chevrolet Citation, Rock Salt Sandblasting Edition
This is the third week in Themed Junkyard Find Week Madness. We started with 21st Century Junkyard Find Week, then had Volkswagen Junkyard Find Week, and now we’ve staggered right into Rusty Junkyard...
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Crapwagon Outtake: 1980 Datsun 280ZX Black Gold Anniversary Edition
Like most sports cars, the Z got fat as it aged. The one/two combo punch of emissions and safety regulations worked over many a performance car throughout the ’70s, some not surviving the decade. The...
View ArticleJunkyard Find: 1980 Mercury Capri
Ford built cars on the Fox Platform for nearly or more than 20 years, depending on whether you consider the SN-95 Mustang to be a true member of the Fox family. However, most of the examples I see in...
View ArticleJunkyard Find: 1980 Toyota Corolla Station Wagon
The fourth-generation Corolla was a gigantic sales success in California, but you won’t see many of these TE72 wagons even in rust-free regions these days; nearly all of them were driven into the...
View ArticleJunkyard Find: 1980 Toyota Corona Liftback Sedan
I have an extensive formative history with the 1965-70 (third-generation) Toyota Corona, and so I photograph them whenever I find them in junkyards. So far in this series, prior to today, we’ve seen...
View ArticleJunkyard Find: 1980 Plymouth Arrow
Chrysler imported and rebadged quite an assortment of Mitsubishis during the gloomy years of the Malaise Era, and we have seen a good sampling of those cars in this series so far. There was the...
View ArticleGreat Little Car Now Great Little Source of Scrap Steel
Not many folks remember Mazda’s Chevette competitor, the rear-drive Mazda GLC. OK, it was more of a Toyota Starlet competitor, but there’s a certain Chevette-ness about its lines. I spotted this...
View ArticleWhere Have All The Front-Wheel-Drive Pickups Gone? Crunch, Crunch, Crunch!
The pickup-truck version of the Volkswagen Rabbit might seem like a terrible idea nowadays, but these things actually turned out to be pretty useful in the real world. You couldn’t haul 1,500 pounds of...
View ArticleCould This Be The Ideal Colorado Winter Car?
I moved to Denver over the summer and am now experiencing the joys of proper snow driving for the first time in the 29 years since the State of California saw fit to give me my first driver’s license....
View ArticleJunkyard Find: 1980 Honda Civic 1500 GL
Back in the Malaise Era, why did anyone buy a Corolla (or an Omni or GLC or any other miserable underpowered econobox) instead of a Civic? Somehow, Soichiro‘s little car managed to be economical,...
View ArticleJunkyard Find: 1980 Toyota Cressida
The Cressida was never a big seller in North America, and the second- and third-generation versions make up most of the examples you’ll see these days. First-gen ones like this ’80 I spotted in an...
View ArticleJunkyard Find: 1980 Chevrolet Chevette
We give GM a hard time over the Citation, but at least the Citation was a big leap into the future compared to the primitive, rear-drive, Opel-designed Chevette. However, it tells us something that...
View ArticleThe Greatest— and Sexiest— Car Ad of All Time: 1980 Black Gold Datsun 280ZX!
The latest crop of Super Bowl car ads boasted some high-production-value salaciousness, but no car advertisement will ever come close to the perfection of the Quaaludes-and-disco Black Gold Man and...
View ArticleJunkyard Find: 1980 Toyota Celica Coupe
The Malaise Era Celica sold very well in the United States as a fuel-efficient-yet-reasonably-sporty commuter vehicle. They were very reliable (by the not-very-high standards of the time), cheap, and...
View ArticleJunkyard Find: 1980 Triumph TR7 With V8 V6 Swap
We’ve seen a couple of “poor man’s TR8” race cars in the 24 Hours of LeMons: you take a TR7 and drop a junkyard V8 out of a junked Land Rover into it. This works better than both the “really poor man’s...
View ArticleJunkyard Find: 1980 Mercury Capri
The Fox Platform was one of Ford’s biggest postwar success stories; a (relatively) modern, (sort of) lightweight unibody design that could be used for everything from economy commuters to...
View ArticleJunkyard Find: 1980 Cadillac Seville ‘Bustleback’
Our last three Junkyard Finds have been Deutschland machines, and before that we had four trucks in a row. That means that we are overdue for some genuine Malaise Era Detroit luxury, and I have found a...
View ArticleJunkyard Find: 1980 Buick Skylark Limited
We saw a Cadillac and an Oldsmobile as our last two Junkyard Finds, so how about another member of the General Motors family? Yes, it’s a rare example of the Buick sibling to the Chevrolet Citation,...
View ArticleJunkyard Find: 1980 Datsun 310 Coupe
Nissan sold lots of the original Datsun 510s in the United States, and so the remainder of the 1970s saw a whole series of model names ending in “10” showing up in Datsun dealerships. Some (e.g., the...
View ArticleJunkyard Find: 1980 Plymouth Horizon
After the Oil Crisis of 1973, Chrysler didn’t have the resources needed to design and build a subcompact economy car from scratch. Fortunately, Chrysler’s Japanese ally, Mitsubishi, was willing to ship...
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