Junkyard Find: 1992 Ford Tempo GL

To gather the photographs for the Junkyard Find series, I do a lot of walking around self-service wrecking yards, and mostly I'm just tuning out the common cars as background noise. You know, the 15-to-20-year-old Detroit stuff that won't have any collector value until almost all are gone (as happened with the Pinto and Vega). The chaff. Right now, the Taurus/Sable is king of the Ford sections of these yards (I counted 188 of them in a 300-car section in a California yard not long ago), but you also see large numbers of Tempos and Topazes. Once I decided to pay attention to the lowly Tempo, I was surprised by the number of not-particularly-trashed examples I found at my local yard. Today, and just today, let's pay attention to one of the most common vehicles in American self-serve junkyards today: the Tempo. Though I got some anguished comments from the Jalopnik reader "Ford_Tempo_Fanatic" when I demolished a free Tempo Judgemobile at a LeMons race, to most of us the Tempo remains invisible. They're not terribly uncommon on the street, though the last few years have been rough on surviving Tempos. The Tempo was built from the 1984 through 1994 model years, before being replaced by the Mondeo-based Contour. Yes, Contours are also common junkyard finds. The era of screaming all-red car interiors seems to have peaked in the early 1990s. Detroit was a little late to the red interior party, but made up for the lateness with even redder reds than the Japanese used in the middle 1980s. The Tempo got the job done and sold in large quantities, but was looking quite outdated by the time this one was built. Did it begin its career as a rental? from The Truth About Cars http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com

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