Junkyard Find: 1986 Peugeot 505 S
There was a time when Peugeots— mostly 504s but the occasional 404 as well— were quite common in American self-service junkyards. Back in the early 1990s, when I owned a free 504, you could count on finding junkyard parts at every good-sized U-Wrench-It in Northern California, and as recently as the late 2000s I found the occasional 504 and even this 404. Nowadays, though, all you’re going to see is 505s and 405s, from the final years of Peugeot’s North American presence, and they’re sufficiently rare that we’ve seen just this 405 in this series prior to today. However, a few 505s managed to soldier on for a couple decades after Peugeot fled back across the Atlantic (or at least managed to survive in storage for that time), and I found this ’86 in a San Francisco Bay Area wrecking yard earlier this year.
This one had a 2013 San Francisco residential parking permit, from the exceptionally-nightmarish-to-find-parking-even-by-SF-standards Inner Sunset neighborhood. The car probably got towed for having its front bumper 7/16″ into a red zone, and the owner couldn’t afford the $1,800 in impound fees (I’m exaggerating, but not as much as you might think) to get his or her Peugeot back.
162,862 miles for this car, which is pretty good by mid-80s standards.
Peugeots of the 1970s and 1980s were very pleasant cars to drive, much more comfortable than any competition anywhere in their price range, but getting parts for the all-too-frequent breakdowns was tough. Yes, Europeans, we know the 505 was considered a fairly reliable car over there.
How many rearview-mirror decorations go to the Crusher each year?
Nothing else feels like it.
You could still buy a new 504 in Argentina when this ad came out, but the 505 got more sax. And mimes.
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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I being from Cleveland never have seen one on the road, if there were Peugeot dealers, there weren't many around here.
I was young back then. I thought they were really elegant cars. Not in an ostentatious way. In an elegant way. My warm feelings were probably colored by ny grandfather who had one simply because grandma with her broken hip could negotiate the door. I was right. My god a Peugeot was comfortable. I wish there was something like this today.