Perhaps one of our Japanese-speaking readers might give us a translation of the dialogue delivered by the two men in their bizarre silver-and-white striped suits and their sentient Sprinter Caribbean companion. Compare this fine ad to the lame-o Official Car Of Santa Claus ad that we got in North America!

Disappointingly, the Clunkmaster couldn't use any of the parts on this 160,000-mile Toyota, but I'm sure some lucky junkyard scavenger will pick it clean before The Crusher consumes it as part of a Tercel-Starlet tiny Toyota appetizer.

One doesn't expect to run into one of these screamin' rally machines in Italy, much less California, yet quick-witted Naters4 was ready with his iPhone when he saw this car:

Hey Murilee,

I've been hunting this car for a while. I'd seen it driving around the neighborhood in San Francisco but had only managed shitty blurry phone pictures. Then I saw it park behind me as I got in my truck the other week outside Best Buy. A couple older Italian gentlemen (apparently father and son) got out and went into the store and I took pictures until they came back out and I could talk to them a little. Didn't talk much, but he offered to let me sit in it and after I asked about importing it he said it "cost as much to federalize it as it did to buy."

I only caught it at night, but I did my best to get some decent pictures. We tried with 3 cameras, and unfortunately the iPhone took most of the good ones but the color wasn't as great. I've included a couple with better color from a different camera.

Anyways, I finally got some time with the Italian ghost and your DOTSBE Lancia Fulvia inspired me to finally send my pictures in. Not sure if they are DOTS quality, but I hope so. At least worth having a look at because this car is so damn sexy.

Thanks,
Nate (aka Naters4)

We see an exquisitely mid-80s British couple having a Silvia-style rendezvous, he with the silver manual-trans car and she in the slushbox red one. Sure, they'd both have looked a lot cooler in TVR 280is, but he'd probably have ended up sliding off the road and into a drainage ditch, while she'd have been incinerated by the inevitable electrical fire.

So to test out my theory I left the camera at home today and went about my day. In the afternoon, while walking to a meeting, what do you know, I come across a beautiful vintage Ford Transit (Mk II I think, the '78 to '86 production run, yes the Ford streak continues!).
Well technically I stumbled upon a beautiful yellow one first, and then, hidden by a moving truck, there was a grey/blue/bondo beater one with a high roof ( a camper top of some kind) that was even cooler, or at least more sinister.
The guys in the moving truck were quite amused by the weird dude in the Corduroy suit, snapping pictures of two old vans with a look of genuine happiness on his face...
I hope you find these two vans as I cool as I did!
bon weekend

The Celebrity Eurosport was one of The General's many last-ditch attempts to win back all those un-American traitors who defected to the Honda and Toyota camps after a decade of Chevettes, Citations, and J2000s. It had more interior room than the old rear-wheel-drive Malibu and handled better than the regular Celebrity, but after that it becomes tough to find things to love about this car. But maybe we're all wrong about the Celebrity Eurosport! Maybe pristine unrestored examples will fetch six-figure sums at Barrett-Jackson in a few years!

I was scoping the junkyard for interesting stuff when I spotted this '87 Nissan Maxima. I figured I'd check for a Voice Annunciator Phonograph Unit within.

It appears that Nissan had gone solid-state for their "talking car" feature by 1987, so no tiny phonograph. Disappointing. But then a row of dash controls caught my eye.

You can tell that engineers came up with this arrangement, not a bunch of Apple-worshiping designers and their focus-group-wrangling marketing overlords. No doubt the Japanese version of the "SECU- RITY" light (which I assume has something to do with a primitive mid-80s alarm system) sports a graceful kanji character, and when the engineers got their English translation it just made sense to hyphenate the word to make it fit. What the hell, right? You can still understand it! We gotta move these Maximas out the door, ASAP!

Those of you on the other side of the Atlantic might note that the Kent was installed in plenty of beloved British Ford machinery, including the Anglia and Cortina. In fact, the Kent qualifies for our upcoming Longest-Lived Vehicle Engines Of All Freakin' Time feature, being manufactured from 1959 until the present day. Variations of the Kent (some with overhead-cam heads) were used in cars ranging from the Fiesta to the Lotus Elan to the TVR Vixen.

[Wikipedia , image source: Burton Power]

What can we say? I was going to use it for a Project Car Hell contestant, but what could possibly compete with a 1980 Cadillac Seville limo for this kind of price? Not only that, the seller claims "HELL YES IT DID RUN WHEN PARKED!!!! Rats chewed some of the wires." How hard could it be? And not only do you get the reviled much-sought-after "bustle-back" trunk, you get genuine CIA provenance!
[Craigslist Inland Empire, go here if the listing disappears]

Yes, they were still putting on that 60s-style SimuWood™ plastic siding on Jeeps as late as Reagan's second term; note the plastic "dowels" and decal inserts. Enough time has passed that this stuff is now cool! This truck is also notable for its AMC 360 V8, an engine that Chrysler kept in production all the way until 1991.

I found this truck at one of the now-defunct East Bay Pick Your Part yards, so we can assume that any parts that you see here have now been digested and dumped into a Guangzhou-bound container ship.

Speaking of weird Fiats, there's nothing wrong with an X1/9 that a supercharger can't fix!

And just to show that the 24 Hours Of LeMons is taking over the universe (or at least the portion of the universe comprised of Northern California car shows), here's a shot of the Italian Stallions X1/9 LeMons car. We'll be seeing this quad-carbed monster at the Arse Freeze-a-Palooza next month!

What could be better than a Maserati straight six engine? A Maserati straight six engine with Lucas fuel injection, of course! I can't see a single weak point in that plan! OK, here's a gallery for you. We'll be seeing more of that orange Fiat 128 Sport a little later; very interesting story there.

Click on the photo of any engine below to jump to the original post honoring that engine.

Toyota R	Ford Flathead V8	BMW M30
Nissan L	Small-Block Chevrolet V8	Volkswagen Air-Cooled
BMC B Series	Chrysler Slant Six	Rolls-Royce V8
Honda B	GMC Twin Six	Jaguar XK
Pontiac V8	Mazda B	Fiat Twin-Cam
Porsche Flat Six	Offenhauser	Willys Go-Devil
Chrysler LA	Packard Inline 8	Mazda 13B
Crosley COBRA	Volvo Red Block	Subaru EJ
AMC Straight Six	Citroën Type A	Toyota A
Ford Windsor V8	Mercedes-Benz OM617	Nissan SR
Chrysler Trans Four	Chevrolet D V8	Ford Modular
Chrysler A57 Multibank	Ford OHC	Honda D
Buick Nailhead	Buick 215/Rover V8	BMW M10
Volkswagen W	Chrysler IV2220 V16	MEMZ-968
Lotus 900 Series	Ford 385	Mercedes-Benz M100 V8
Chrysler B V8	Toyota M	General Motors LS
Honda F20C	Alfa Romeo Twin Cam	Yamaha SHO V6
BMW M70 V12	Mitsubishi Sirius	Saab H
GM Iron Duke	Coventry Climax FW/FP	Ferrari Dino V6/V8/V12
Ford FE V8	BMC A	Audi 4.2 V8
Big-Block Chevrolet V8	BMW M20	Fiat SOHC
Chrysler Flathead Six	Saab 2-Stroke	Oldsmobile Gen 2 V8
Suzuki G	PRV V6	Cadillac OHV V8
Hudson Six	Nissan VH	Ford Model T
Buick V6	Nissan VG

Last week, we saw this junked Mercury LN7, and one of its competitors from back in the day was located just a few rows away: this '84 Nissan Pulsar NX.

The Pulsar NX (sold in Europe as the Pulsar EXA) was a two-seater with a great deal of Sentra ancestry. This one managed to survive with just two seats and no cup holders through just about the entire rise and fall of the SUV, yet now it will be joining all those Clunkerized Explorers in the cold steel jaws of The Crusher.

Check out that snazzy steering wheel and two-tone interior!

Of course, we all know now that you pretty much need AWD to negotiate your typical shopping mall parking lot, so maybe Chrysler made a mistake by killing off the Eagle soon after gobbling up AMC in 1987. Could Chrysler have beat Subaru at its own game, had they only kept developing the Eagle?

If you like weird twists and turns in your engine-history plot, you'll like the Buick V6. Buick engineers took their aluminum 215-cube V8, lopped off a couple of cylinders, and cast the shortened block and heads in cast iron. The result displaced 198 cubes and made its debut (as the "Fireball V6") in the 1962 Buick Special. Oldsmobile and Buick dropped the 198 and later 225 into their A-bodies, but The General made the decision to use the Chevrolet I6 250 as their six-banger of choice. The V6 was sold off to… ready for this? Kaiser-Jeep! When those Kenosha swashbucklers at AMC bought Kaiser-Jeep in 1970, the bulletproof AMC Straight Six shoved the Buick aside.
Fast-forward to the dawn of the Malaise Era: "Rat turds!" screamed The General's suits up on the Fourteenth Floor, "We need a V6, like, yesterday! So, all the Buick V6 tooling traveled back from Wisconsin to Detroit and the world was introduced to the 231-cubic-inch "new" Buick V6, which was installed in such stellar machines as the Skyhawk. The funky "odd-fire" crank setup made the engine rough, but reliability was very good (and The General eventually loosened the purse strings enough for his engineers to make a smoother "even-fire" version).
Keep fast-forwarding, and you'll find this engine surviving through the Malaise Era, through the Oliver North Era, and all the way up until the present day. Displacements have come and gone, but the 3800 aka 231 has proven itself to have the real staying power; not only did a turbocharged version power the legendary Buick GNX, but Eaton superchargers started getting bolted on during the 90s. What was the most powerful factory Buick V6? Well, that depends on whether you believe The General's numbers about the GNX! Hate away, you pushrod-phobes, but you're looking at a success story.

[Wikipedia, image source here]

The Omni/Horizon did its job, which was to provide a semi-homegrown econobox to help replace the captive-import Mitsubishis and keep the revenue flowing until Chrysler could start moving K cars into the showrooms and pay back that big government bailout loan. In fact, this platform continued in production until 1990.

I stopped by a couple of my local self-service wrecking yards yesterday, just to see what new and interesting clunkerization victims I might find. Not long ago, we saw a glut of clunkicided Japanese luxury machines, and now it's Mercedes-Benz's turn. This is just a small sampling of the dozens of big Benzes with the telltale pink paint on the engines. You want really nice body and interior parts for your spared-from-clunkdown Mercedes? Come on down!

Just for fun, let's price a few more of the cars we see here (2009 dollars in parentheses).
1990 560SEL: $73,800 ($121,871)
1988 260E: $37,250 ($64,837)
1988 300TE: $46,980 ($85,713)

While Nissan continued to build inline sixes well into the current century, the more compact V6 design provided more versatility for front-wheel-drive installations (while allowing for shorter engine compartments in rear-wheel-drive cars) and was built in much larger numbers. Available in displacements of 2.0, 3.0, and 3.3 liters and equipped with single- or double-overhead camshafts, the VG was installed in everything from the Z to the Hardbody truck.

[Wikipedia]

That number two contender is the Booby Prize Racing '96 Nissan 200SX, a car that the LeMons Supreme Court picked during the BS Inspection as the Under The Radar Candidate Most Likely To Contend. Looks like we guessed right this time!

In third we have the 1993 Honda Civic driven by Team "Corvette." No, we don't get the team name either.

Right behind the Honda is one of the top finishers from the last New England LeMons: the Scuderia Limoni Alfa Romeo Milano.

In fifth, we have another dominating New England veteran, the Scuderia Testa di Spillo Milano. Oh yes, two Milanos in the top five. Could this be the first-ever LeMons victory by an Italian car? Check in later to find out!