Junkyard Find: 1976 Dodge Aspen
It’s hard to believe that the Dodge Aspen was once a common sight on the street, seen as frequently back in the Malaise Era as CR-Vs are today. Cops drove them, college students drove them, old ladies drove them; as the successor to the Dart, the Aspen was about as mainstream as it was possible to be. Then, sometime around about 1990, just about all of them were swallowed up by a hole in the earth.
Every so often, however, an Aspen hangs on long enough to show up in a self-service wrecking yard. Here’s one I found in a Denver yard yesterday.
What can I say about this interior? The less said, the better.
This example appears to have a pretty hefty selection of quasi-luxurious options, including the much-sought-after “Schnauzer On A Stick” heraldic crest on the grille.
You can’t go wrong with a Slant Six under the hood. Well, unless it’s a LeBaron.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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If this was an R/T model, I'd buy it. I always had a soft spot for the Aspen R/Ts. If I had one, I could salvage the body shell and glass, and swap out everything else. Then I'd have a custom chassis installed in place of the original unibody chassis.
My neighbor had one of these, the same color, and her best friend had a same year white Volare. Sure enough, around 1990 - 91 it was replaced in her driveway by a Nissan Sentra.