No Reserve! 1971 Custom Touring Pontiac Gto on 2040-cars

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Are orphan cars better deals?

Most folks don't know a Saturn Aura from an Oldsmobile Aurora. Those of you who are immersed in the labyrinth of automobilia know that both cars were testaments to the mediocrity that was pre-bankruptcy General Motors, and that both brands are now long gone. But everybody else? Not so much. By the same token, there are some excellent cars and trucks that don't raise an eyebrow simply because they were sold under brands that are no longer being marketed. Orphan brands no longer get any marketing love, and because of that they can be alarmingly cheap. Case in point, take a look at how a 2010 Saturn Outlook compares with its siblings, the GMC Acadia and Buick Enclave. According to the Manheim Market Report, the Saturn will sell at a wholesale auto auction for around $3,500 less than the comparably equipped Buick or GMC. Part of the reason for this price gap is that most large independent dealerships, such as Carmax, make it a point to avoid buying cars with orphaned badges. Right now if you go to Carmax's site, you'll find that there are more models from Toyota's Scion sub-brand than Mercury, Saab, Pontiac, Hummer, and Saturn combined. This despite the fact that these brands collectively sold in the millions over the last ten years while Scion has rarely been able to realize a six-figure annual sales figure for most of its history. That is the brutal truth of today's car market. When the chips are down, used-car shoppers are nearly as conservative as their new-car-buying counterparts. Unfamiliarity breeds contempt. Contempt leads to fear. Fear leads to anger, and pretty soon you wind up with an older, beat-up Mazda MX-5 in your driveway instead of looking up a newer Pontiac Solstice or Saturn Sky. There are tons of other reasons why orphan cars have trouble selling in today's market. Worries about the cost of repair and the availability of parts hang over the industry's lost toys like a cloud of dust over Pigpen. Yet any common diagnostic repair database, such as Alldata, will have a complete framework for your car's repair and maintenance, and everyone from junkyards to auto parts stores to eBay and Amazon stock tens of thousands of parts. This makes some orphan cars mindblowingly awesome deals if you're willing to shop in the bargain bins of the used-car market. Consider a Suzuki Kizashi with a manual transmission. No, really.

Junkyard Gem: 1991 Pontiac Grand Am LE with Quad 4 Engine

GM introduced the N-Body compact platform with the Oldsmobile Calais and Pontiac Grand Am for the 1985 model year and continued building N-based cars through 1998. Most of these cars weren't interesting from an enthusiast standpoint, but a handful rolled off the assembly line with raucous DOHC Oldsmobile Quad 4 engines and manual transmissions, and those cars were plenty of fun. Here's a 1991 Grand Am with that rare setup, photographed in a self-service yard in California's Central Valley. The base engine in the 1991 Grand Am was the 110-horsepower, 2.5-liter pushrod Iron Duke, an engine that might have been fine on a Romanian tractor in 1953 but had no place on an American street car as the 21st century approached. Fortunately, GM started bolting the modern 2.3-liter DOHC Quad 4 engine into 1988 cars, and this was a proper four-cylinder. The Quad 4 ran a little rough and uncivilized, and it had its share of reliability problems, but you could rev the piss out of it and it made good power. In 1991, this engine was rated at 180 hp. That made this 2,592-pound sedan pretty quick. Unfortunately, the slushboxization of America had progressed with depressing rapidity during the 1980s, and by 1991 most Grand Am buyers — even the ones who opted for the Quad 4 — chose the automatic transmission. That didn't happen with this car, though — it boasts a rugged Getrag 5-speed instead of the happiness-amputating three-speed automatic. Yes, that's the kind of odometer reading you'd expect to see on an Accord or Maxima from this era. Someone loved this car and took care of it. Here we see an interesting mix of 1980s and 1990s car-radio technology. CD players in cars were still costly luxury items in 1991, seldom seen in affordable cars like the Grand Am, while 1980s-style slider-style EQ controls were on the way out. This Delco unit straddles both decades nicely. I seek out Quad 4-equipped cars during my junkyard travels, and I have photographed quite a few: this '89 Cutlass Calais, this '90 Cutlass Calais, this '90 Grand Am, this '91 Quad 442, this '93 Achieva SCX, and this '98 Cavalier Z24. It's a shame that Buick never put the Quad 4 in the Reatta, which was a fine car ruined by a somnolent and obsolete V6. The music in this ad is even more early-1990s than Crystal Pepsi. This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings.

Junkyard Gem: 2001 Pontiac Bonneville SSEi

The General's Pontiac Division sold Bonnevilles from 1958 through 2005, which turned out to be well over half of the marque's existence. Named after the Bonneville Salt Flats, some Bonnevilles were huge but pretty quick, others were slow-motion land yachts, and some were nearly indistinguishable from their Buick and Oldsmobile brethren. The final generation, sold for the 2000 through 2005 model years, were among the quickest and most distinctive-looking Bonnevilles ever built, but they arrived in showrooms at a time when the clock was ticking for the division's very survival. Today's Junkyard Gem is one of those cars, an '01 with the hot-rod SSEi package. The Bonneville SSEi first appeared in the 1992 model year, just a year after the Buick Park Avenue Ultra was the first of many GM cars to get the 3.8-liter Buick V6 with an Eaton supercharger bolted on top. Production of the Bonneville SSEi continued through the 2003 model year, after which the GXP version and its Cadillac Northstar V8 took over. The 2001 version of this engine made 240 horsepower, good for plenty of torque-steery fun. Could you get this car with a manual transmission? What do you think? Some cursory research indicates that 1970 was the last model year for a three-pedal Bonneville, and even those cars must be incredibly rare. This one looks to have been in nice shape when it arrived here, with the original manuals still in the glovebox. By 2006, the Bonneville was gone; four years later, Pontiac was gone. This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings. Stop all black Bonnevilles!