No doubt a lot of four doors in the shot. But that light color Dodge in the front is a pretty rare body style. Not to mention the humpback panel. Not everyone hates four doors.
A car is built at an auto factory. Some one buys the new car from a dealership. They drive it 3-4 years and trade if off for a new model. It gets sold as a used car to someone that couldn't afford to buy it new. They use it 3-4 years, until the upkeep becomes too expensive. That family buys another 3-4 year old used car, the old car becomes a problem to get rid of! Back then, you had to pay a junk yard to come and haul it off, or you let it sit, hoping someone needed something off of it. You drug it back behind the house, behind the barn, or out into the field where you couldn't see it from the house or the road. Up until the mid 1970s, a 10 year old car still being used was pretty rare. Most had failed drive trains (very few lasted much past 90, 000 miles) or the body was rusty or beat up from use. At that point, the 6-8 year old car became junk, unless some kid out of high school fell in love with it, or could s****e up enough cash to drag it home and patch it back together to use. If the above picture was actually taken in 1950, most of those 1930 & 1940s car were well past their useful lives. That 46-48 white Dodge 4 door sedan is already at least 12 years old, way past its useful life, and probably not something a kid would want to drive unless there was no other option. It has arrived at a location where it can finally be converted into something that can live on. All this grieving for the normal life cycle of a car is pretty crazy. This cycle has been going on for over 100 years, and will continue for the next 100 years.
that's an odd way to look at things. my first car was 27 years old, coincidentally, my current car is 27 years old. newest car I ever owned was a 1973 I bought in 1979 with high mileage. drove it for 12 years. I have never owned a car that was less than 10 years old. every daily driver I have owned I had for 10 years or more.
Pacific States Steel is now a housing tract. I used to live 4 miles away from there. wonder what the rate of cancer is for people who live there. it took quite a while after closing before they built the houses because of the cleanup needed. as for the cars, if a person owned all the cars in that pile today it would be several hundred thousand dollars worth.
There’s enough 2 doors in there also to make it interesting. Ain’t that what we do, building new cars out of old ones?
The cycle has been qualitatively changing, gradually since c.1933-34. It stopped somewhere in the '90s, as regards new cars. One factor which is seldom recognised is that older cars reached a point in their depreciation when they were worth more as a load of useful doohickeys and amounts of various materials than they were as ***embled cars. If they didn't depreciate that much they would last as long as you kept fixing them, because initially the processes of maintenance and repair were basically the same as the processes of manufacture. For the same reason it remained technically possible to build cars back out of those useful doohickeys and materials, and a fair deal of that did in fact happen once people got pissed off with the direction the new stuff was going. That is how specials happened, as early as the mid-'30s. By c.1995 the processes of maintenance and repair had diverged radically from the processes of manufacture. By the same programme cars decreasingly turned into collections of useful gadgets as they depreciated, and instead began to turn into piles of industrial feedstocks — if not landfill or garbage islands at sea.
The Jalopy Journal
