2000 Pontiac Sunfire Se Coupe 2-door 2.2l on 2040-cars

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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.

GM recalling 778,000 Cobalts and G5s, six deaths reported

General Motors has announced that it will be recalling 778,562 compact cars after six people were killed in accidents, partially due to the airbags' failure to deploy. An issue with the ignition switch is causing the airbag issues, as well as causing the engine and other components to shut off without warning. The recall covers the 2005 to 2007 model year Chevrolet Cobalt and 2007 Pontiac G5. (Note that the Cobalt pictured above is a 2009 model.)
According to a report from Automotive News, a number of factors can cause the ignition to switch out of the run position, including weights on the key ring, rough or bumpy roads or other "jarring" events. Any of these situations could lead to some vehicle components not functioning properly.
There have been five fatal front-impact crashes that took the lives of six people, although as a GM spokesman noted, all five of the crashes happened off road and at high speed. In each of these cases, though, the lack of airbags wasn't the only lethal factor - alcohol and failure to wear a seat belt also played a role. Outside of the fatal accidents, there have been 17 other crashes where airbags didn't deploy. It's unclear if any of these crashes were caused by the engine shutting off.

Airbag recall adds 85k Pontiac Vibes to tally

The repairs needed for the faulty airbag inflators supplied by Takata continue to expand. Toyota initially announced a recall of 766,300 vehicles equipped with the bad part on June 11 as a followup to a campaign from 2013. Soon after, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened a preliminary evaluation into five automakers who also used the component in their models. Now, NHTSA has released the official announcement of the latest Toyota recall listing 844,277 affected cars, including the newly added 2003-2004 Pontiac Vibe.
While NHTSA's document didn't include a model-by-model breakdown, General Motors spokesperson Alan Adler estimated to Autoblog that roughly 85,000 Vibes in the US would be covered under the latest recall. Like the rest of the affected models, the airbag inflator could rupture in a crash causing the bag not to work correctly, possibly spraying metal fragments at the occupant.
Toyota spokesperson Cindy Knight told Autoblog that the reason for the disparity between the earlier press release and NHTSA document was that Toyota was continuing to comb through VINs to create a list of affected vehicles. The original number was an estimate of that process at the time. Scroll down to the recall report from NHTSA.