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This junkyard '91 Grand Am is as hooptie as it gets

I spend a lot of time in junkyards. A lot of time. With all this experience, I have learned to recognize a perfect hooptie when I see one, a car whose final owner got every last bit of use out of it when its value was hovering right about at scrap value. This 1991 Pontiac Grand Am that I spotted in a San Francisco Bay Area self-service wrecking yard a few days ago, from the final model year for the third-generation Grand Am, checks all the hooptie boxes just right. First of all, it's a low-option coupe with the wretched and unloved GM Iron Duke engine, a rattly, gnashy, thrashy 2.5-liter four-cylinder kludged together using off-the-shelf parts from the Pontiac 301-cubic-inch V8 during the darkest years of the Malaise Era and used in cars whose buyers just didn't care. Most of the paint has been burned off by 25 years of harsh California sun, but the car spent sufficient time in a damp, shady spot for lichens to build up here and there. There are skeletons-with-sombreros stencils sprayed here and there, plus a big moonshine-guzzling skeleton mural painted on the hood. Goodbye, property values! Still, someone felt some affection for this car, giving it the name "Good Ol' Snakey" and painting that name on the decklid. We can assume that the Iron Duke was a bit loose by this time, probably leaving a serpentine trail of blue smoke behind the car at all times. So, the combination of cheapness, ugliness, menace, and who-gives-a-damn functionality make this Grand Am an excellent example of a pure hooptie. Within a couple of months, it will be crushed, shredded, shipped out of the Port of Oakland, and reborn in China as refrigerators and Geely Emgrands. Somewhere in Northern California, though, a few of Ol' Smokey's friends will remember this car fondly.

Junkyard Gem: 1996 Pontiac Grand Am SE Coupe

The Grand Am was the best-selling Pontiac model in the United States for every year of the 1990s, and it outsold most of its N-Body platform-mates (including the Chevrolet Corsica/Beretta) during nearly all of that decade. A sporty-looking compact with two or four doors, the Grand Am offered true 1990s radness—and, in some cases, respectable performance — at a good price. Today's Junkyard Gem is a nicely preserved example of the facelifted 1996 Grand Am, found in a Denver-area car graveyard. This is an SE Coupe with base engine and transmission, the most affordable Grand Am available in 1996. List price was $13,499, or about $26,523 in 2023 dollars. The factory-issued Monroney sheet for this car was still inside, so we can see that the original buyer got the car at Bob Ruwart Motors in Wheatland, Wyoming (about 175 miles up I-25 from this Pontiac's final parking spot), and paid a total of $16,054 ($31,543 in today's money) after the cost of options and the destination charge. The '96 Grand AM SE buyer had to pay extra for cruise control, air conditioning, power windows, rear glass defogger and other features we now take for granted on new cars. The base engine was the 2.4-liter Twin Cam four cylinder, a member of the screaming Oldsmobile Quad 4 family. This one was rated at 150 horsepower and 155 pound-feet. A 3.1-liter V6 with 155 horses and 185 pound-feet was an option. If you got the V6 in your '96 Grand Am, however, you couldn't get a manual transmission. This car has a proper five-speed manual, which made for fun driving with the high-revving Twin Cam engine in a machine weighing just 2,802 pounds (which is quite a bit less than what the current Honda Civic weighs). It traveled just over 160,000 miles during its 27 years on the road. The body and interior were still in fairly good condition when the car arrived here, so we can assume that some expensive mechanical problem doomed this car. Perhaps the original clutch wore out and the owner didn't consider it worth replacing. After all, a mid-1990s Detroit two-door with a transmission most people can't drive isn't worth much these days. Though nobody knew it when this car was new, the Grand Am would be gone in nine years and Pontiac itself would get the axe five years after that. It makes the ordinary extraordinary. Husbands and wives would argue for 12 hours over who got to drive the Grand Am, if we are to believe this ad. Proud sponsor of the 1996 Olympic team.

Junkyard Gem: 2001 Pontiac Grand Prix GTP

For General Motors, the W platform just kept giving and giving and giving for decade after decade, serving as the basis of Buick Regals, Oldsmobile Intrigues, Chevrolet Monte Carlos, and many, many more models. The final and most powerful Pontiac W-Body, the sixth-generation Grand Prix GTP, rolled off assembly lines for the 1997 through 2003 model years. Here's one in a Northern California self-service wrecking yard. GM bolted the supercharged 3800 V6 into vast numbers of cars during this era, providing a deep reservoir of cheap blowers for unwise high-boost projects. 240 front-tire-charring horses, complete with a Roots-type blower scream from the Eaton supercharger under the hood. I see plenty of blown 3800s during my junkyard travels, from the Bonneville SSEi to the Oldsmobile LSS. Depressingly, GM stopped putting manual transmissions in the Grand Prix during the 1993 model year, so '01 GTP owners had to take the four-speed slushbox. This one came close to the magic 200,000-mile mark, but fell 25,000 short. The interior took a beating during its life, ending its time on the road with shredded upholstery and dirty panels. Seven-band graphic equalizers were all the rage during the 1980s, but GM kept the tradition alive into our current century. This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings. Grips the pavement like ... a shopping cart on wet linoleum? Featured Gallery Junked 2001 Pontiac Grand Prix GTP View 21 Photos Auto News Pontiac Automotive History