The highest-mile junkyard vehicle I’ve ever written about was a Georgetown-built 1996 Toyota Avalon with 949,863 miles on the odometer. I say that’s an American car, but what if your definition requires that a vehicle’s manufacturer be based in the United States? In that case, today’s Junkyard Find is the new Murilee Martin Born In The USA Junkyard Odometer champion.
I found this Astro while visiting the San Francisco Bay Area in July, in the same San Jose car graveyard that boasted a 1963 Sunbeam Imp, a 313k-mile 1995 Mazda MX-6 and a nicely executed 1987 Nissan Sentra Sawzall Roadster.
I put a lot of effort into finding, categorizing and documenting high-mile discarded vehicles, and my spreadsheet tells me that today’s California Astro is the 11th-best-traveled US-built machine in the Murilee Martin Junkyard Odometer Standings. It’s number 24 overall, between a 431k-mile Sentra and a 419k-mile Camry.
The former high-mile Numero Uno for US-built cars made by a US-based manufacturer was this 1986 Old Calais with 363k miles. There would be more such cars on my list if Detroit had gone to six-digit mechanical odometers earlier than the middle 1990s, but this car is an outlier. Since everybody went to hard-to-read-in-junkyards electronic odometers by the early 2000s, I face challenges finding Detroit iron with intergalactic final mileage readings.
And, just because I think it’s interesting, the highest-mile Chevrolet I’d documented in a junkyard prior to today’s Astro was this ex-taxi Caprice with 350k miles. Below that was a 314k-mile S-10 Blazer (that I haven’t written about yet), and that’s it for Chevy in the MMJOS.
Speaking of the Chevy S-10, The General saved quite a few bucks by lifting plenty of parts-bin hardware for the Astro. That’s a first-generation S-10 speedometer, and the powertrain is all S-10 stuff as well. The front suspension was borrowed from GM B-Body station wagons.
As you’d expect, this is a base no-option Astro that spent most of its life as a delivery truck.
How many boxes were thrown in here?
Judging from the floor-to-ceiling paint scrapes, it lived a hard life.
While the drivers of today’s Astro was hauling boxes on Northern California freeways, so was I. During the 1990-1993 period, I held a number of East Bay warehouse, light-industrial and delivery jobs. Many of those gigs involved driving battered Detroit vans with no air conditioning (e.g., the diesel Econoline in this film selfie) on a chunk of the Golden State stretching from the Great Highway to State Route 99, Ukiah to Soledad.
Maybe I waited for this van to be finished hogging a loading dock in 1992. As my uncle, Dirty Duck, used to say: “You never know, you know?”
I think it then ended up being a 49ers tailgatemobile, judging by the stickers on the exterior.
While I was speculating on the history this van, I ended up in a lengthy discussion of the Viagra Boys (and Swedish punk rock in general) with the dudes a row over who were pulling a Grand Cherokee transmission. It was a good junkyard day for me.
Apparently, there was a 49ers Super Bowl fish fry at Stanford University in 1985; someone affiliated with this van had a sticker celebrating it.
The first-generation Astro was built for the 1985 through 1994 model years, after which it got a facelift for the 1995-2005 “long-nose” second-gen vans.
I couldn’t get the hood open to shoot the engine (a common GM problem of this van’s era), but the only one available in 1991 was the 4.3-liter Chevrolet V6. Believe it or not, the Astro was available with Iron Duke power at first.
The Astro could be had with a five-speed manual transmission through 1989. Let me know if you ever see one so equipped.
1991 Chevrolet Astro in California junkyard.
1991 Chevrolet Astro in California junkyard.
1991 Chevrolet Astro in California junkyard.
1991 Chevrolet Astro in California junkyard.
1991 Chevrolet Astro in California junkyard.
1991 Chevrolet Astro in California junkyard.
1991 Chevrolet Astro in California junkyard.
1991 Chevrolet Astro in California junkyard.
1991 Chevrolet Astro in California junkyard.
1991 Chevrolet Astro in California junkyard.
1991 Chevrolet Astro in California junkyard.
[Images: The Author]
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