Hemmings Motor News Blog Blog

Hemmings Motor News Blog

Hemmings Motor News has been around since 1954. We're proud of our heritage, but we're also more than the Hemmings full of classifieds that your father subscribed to. Aside from new editorial content every month in Hemmings, we have three monthly magazines: Hemmings Muscle Machines, Hemmings Classic Car and Hemmings Sports and Exotic Car.

While our editors traverse the country to find the best content for those magazines, we find other oddities related to the old-car hobby that we really had no place for - until now. With this blog, we're giving you a behind-the-scenes look at what we see and what we do during the course of putting out some of the finest automotive magazines you'll ever read.

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Open Diff: What Vehicles Have All but Disappeared in Your Area?

Posted September 28, 2022 5:00 AM by dstrohl
Pathfinder Tags: classic cars

Twenty-something years ago, when I had just started out in newspapers, I'd sometimes wait by the loading docks at the end of the presses for my fresh, hot copy of the next day's paper. Waiting alongside me would be the legion of delivery drivers who had to get bundles of papers to far-flung general stores all over our rural county, and they largely chose Geo Metros to drive on their rounds. One would've thought the paper simply had a fleet of the fuel-sipping subcompacts, but no, those drivers had to use their own transportation for the job, so they rabidly sought out Metros and bought up every single one of them that ever came up for sale in southwestern Oregon.

I know, because I too thought a slightly used Metro would've been ideal for a cub reporter often on the road to attend bridge openings and city council meetings, but invariably every time I called on a Metro in the local classifieds, I found it had already been snatched up, only to see it among the delivery drivers the next day. It got to the point that I stopped looking for Metros and never again started looking. Or, at least, not until McCourt chose that yellow convertible Metro for a Hemmings Find of the Day this past week, dredging up all those memories of never actually finding something that I'd expected to be easy to track down.

Which made me wonder, what other vehicles out there would you expect your local classifieds or even Hemmings to be littered with, but have become, for whatever reason, incredibly scarce? What vehicles has rust utterly eliminated? Which ones haven't you (or likely anybody else) thought of for years? Which ones have become so unloved owners seem more inclined to send to the junkyard than try to sell? Which ones seem destined to LeMons or Gambler infamy?

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Re: Open Diff: What Vehicles Have All but Disappeared in Your Area?

09/28/2022 5:26 PM

Mark I Volkswagen's tend to be rust buckets so there are very few of those around any more unless someone kept it out of the weather and far away from salt.

Also try to find a V-Dub Sirocco of either Mark I or Mark II platforms.

And who couldn't forget the Cavalier?

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Re: Open Diff: What Vehicles Have All but Disappeared in Your Area?

09/28/2022 6:35 PM
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