Junkyard Gem: 1983 Buick LeSabre Estate Station Wagon, Rocky Mountain High Edition

If you live in Colorado and want an affordable chariot to haul you and your snowboarding droogs to the slopes, you
could get one of the obvious cheapskate choices, e.g., a
Tercel 4WD, a
Corolla All-Trac, or an
80s 4WD Subaru wagon. However, if you want to channel the spiritual forefathers of early-1980s punk rock (and you do), you’ll need a big, battered, Detroit bomb. This ’83 LeSabre, spotted in a Denver self-service wrecking yard, is such a car.

As you can see in 1984’s
Suburbia, you’re pretty much halfway to being a member of
The Vandals when you drive a couple of tons of once-luxurious Detroit Iron.

1983 was the final year of
the Malaise Era, and so you didn’t get much power from the V8s back then. The standard engine for the
LeSabre that year was an Olds 307 generating a mere 140 horsepower. The only way to get a burnout out of this setup was to pour a case of Lucky Lager over the right rear tire, then neutral-drop the transmission while floating the valves.

Chrysler and Nissan dominated the Whorehouse Red car interiors during the 1980s, but GM made a respectable showing with this scratchy, velour-influenced stuff.

When you
know you’re a car’s last owner, nothing holds you back from decorating it to suit your tastes. Ron Paul, the Snowboarders + Skiers For Christ, and many other icons of Buick-driving snow enthusiasts are represented upon the ample flanks of this wagon.

How many miles are on it? With a five-digit odometer, there’s no telling. The Colorado sun is rough on interiors, but this car may have spent its first couple of decades parking in a garage, or maybe it came from cloudy Oregon.

Advertising for this generation of LeSabre emphasized fuel economy, which may have been a less-than-convincing approach.

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