Junkyard Find: 2006 Mitsubishi Eclipse
We’re following up a week of Volkswagen Junkyard Finds with 21st Century Junkyard Finds (don’t worry, we’ll go back to Junkyard Finds arranged in whatever random order strikes my fancy soon enough). On the heels of yesterday’s ’02 JuggaLambo, here’s a not-even-a-decade-old fourth-gen Mitsubishi Eclipse that showed up at a Denver yard last week.
You don’t see many cars this new in self-service wrecking yards (unless you’re living in the five-year period following the debut of an excruciatingly bad car), and the ones you do see tend to have been involved in fires, strip-and-dump thefts, or high-speed wrecks. This Mitsu falls in the latter group.
The final owner of this car appears to have been a fan of Drunk Pedobear.
Many stickers adorned this Eclipse. That’s what made it so fast.
Did the speedometer stick at 60 mph at the moment that Mitsubishi steel hit the concrete?
This one has the 162-horse 2.4 with variable valve timing.
This ad is for the previous generation of Eclipse, but it tells us a lot about the car’s target demographic. Are you in?
The ’06 was driven to thrill.
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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My GF has a 2008 GS Spyder. The only good thing is it reliable, other than that it is a horrid car. I avoid driving it as much as possible thought I did have to use it a few times when my car was in the shop. It has a wide turning radius for such a small car. It is sad when a city bus can out turn it. The interior is beyond the chintzy, hard plastics abound. On the Boston roads it jumps around on all the broken pavement. It is somewhat peppy for short distances but runs out of steam fast. The convertible top creates huge blind spots that can hide a semi truck. I can see why they discontinued it.
Everything anybody needs to know about that car is written on the teensy rear brake rotor in the first photograph.