When I visit car graveyards to look for interesting pieces of automotive history, I'm always on the lookout for vehicles with impressively high final odometer readings. I've got a Murilee Martin Junkyard Odometer Top Ten standings list, and the last time it got reshuffled was when a 1991 Honda Accord sedan made the #8 spot with 435,471 miles.
That car pushed another Honda off the scoreboard (a 1983 Accord sedan with 411,794 miles), but now yet another high-mile Honda shoves a 412,013-mile Ford Crown Victoria into 11th place and oblivion.
I found this car in a self-service yard in San Jose, California, which makes sense given the incredibly long commutes many Silicon Valley workers must endure in order to afford housing. With 435,028 miles on a 27-year-old car, that comes to more than 16,100 miles per year, every year. A quarter-century of a miserable bumper-to-bumper commute from, say, Watsonville to Santa Clara would accomplish that.
This car is an ordinary sixth-generation Civic LX sedan, the mid-grade trim level for 1996. It has an automatic transmission and air conditioning, and it sold new for around the equivalent of $28,000 in today's money.
I'm pleased that a Civic finally made my Junkyard Odometer Top Ten, because I've owned and loved many Civics but every Honda on the JOTT list had been an Accord prior to this point. Nothing against the Accord, mind you, but I've never owned one.
Let's take a look at the latest Murilee Martin Junkyard Odometer Top Ten:
- 1990 Volvo 240 DL, 631,999 miles
- 1988 Honda Accord LXi, 626,476 miles
- 1987 Mercedes-Benz 190E, 601,173 miles
- 1981 Mercedes-Benz 300SD, 572,139 miles
- 1985 Mercedes-Benz 300SD, 525,971 miles
- 1988 Honda Accord DX, 513,519 miles
- 1990 Volvo 740 Turbo Wagon, 493,549 miles
- 1991 Honda Accord, 435,417 miles
- 1996 Honda Civic, 435,028 miles
- 1988 Toyota Tercel 4WD Wagon, 413,344 miles
As you can see, today's Junkyard Treasure gives Honda four Top Ten spots, while Mercedes-Benz has three and Volvo has two (though Volvo owns the even greater honor of being King of the Junkyard Odometers). Toyota is in danger of being elbowed off the list completely, but keep in mind that the quantity of 300,000-mile-plus Toyotas I find in junkyards probably beats all other manufacturers combined.
Now we get to the disclaimers. The Junkyard Odometer Top Ten is for vehicles I personally find in car graveyards. There are many vehicles with more miles still on the road, because wouldn't you keep driving a car that reached the magical 400,000-mile mark?
I'm sure that I walk right past plenty of junked cars and trucks with intergalactic miles without knowing it, because most vehicles sold in the United States before the early 1980s (in some cases, the middle 1990s) had five-digit odometers. Most of those sold in our current century have electronic odometers that won't display in the junkyard without heroic measures.
This is an Ohio-built car, assembled by red-blooded Americans. The emissions sticker tells us it was sold originally in California.
The interior looks to have been in good condition when the car arrived in its final parking place, and someone began doing bodywork at some point near the end. Plugging the VIN into the California Smog Check History search page showed a perfect run of passed emissions tests dating back to the beginning, with the most recent in the summer of 2022. Something expensive must have broken, and the final owner must have judged the repairs not worth the cost.
Amazingly, some junkyard shopper bought the engine. Most of us look for low-mile junkyard engine donors with collision damage ("drove to the crash"), but whoever bought the mill from this car must have felt lucky that day.
Junkyard 1996 Honda Civic with 435,028 Miles
