Well, I didn’t actually, but in the not so long tradition of this Curbside Recycling series there have been multiple cars that look just too good to have been casually tossed adrift in the currents running toward the crusher. This may be the best of the bunch so far and if it really were possible to “rescue” cars from the junkyard, I can’t think of many that would be much more comfortable to drive the 900-ish miles from Phoenix back to my town or anywhere else in North America for that matter without needing any obvious work or parts grafted back on from other denizens of the yard. So let’s just continue this little flight of fancy and see what’s making this so compelling.
The LHS has been a popular topic over the years here at Curbside and there are numerous posts and even a COAL or two. Of course as we mostly all know there was a natural progression of the LH-platform cars in the early ’90’s and the LHS was introduced a year after the Dodge Intrepid, Chrysler Concorde, and Eagle Vision as a 1994, so ours is a first-year car (but second-year as far as the platform is concerned).
It’s Phoenix so this was likely someone’s last ride and when the time came perhaps the heirs couldn’t figure an easier way to dispose of it than bringing or sending it here in the time of Covid, another hidden example of the continuing economic losses suffered. There certainly doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with it from a casual viewing. For a mid-90’s car the shape still looks pretty fresh, while the first generation Intrepid has aged a bit along with the Vision and the Concorde, the LHS’s shape seemed to bridge the gap or at least foreshadow the second generation a bit which seems to keep it fresher.
Of course the LHS also saw a second generation but if anything all of those cars got a touch too balloon-shaped and perhaps started to verge on Rubenesque. This here still works for me, even with the semi-formal roofline, thank goodness the backlight isn’t starkly vertical, that was tres passé by 1994.
I have no idea what LHS actually stands for. LH Sport? Last Hope Sedan? Large Heavy Sedan? Lansing High School? Lawrence Howard Sullivan? Loofah Her Side? Love His Sc….alp? Does anyone out there know for real?
The wheels are especially attractive with enough dishing out to make them less boring than many other front wheel drive ABS-equipped cars of the era. Behind those wheels is the same performance tuned suspension as in the Intrepid ES and Vision TSi so it had some handling chops, as least as far as a large American car is concerned. And someone clearly took good care of this car, with not-cheap Michelin Symmetry tires replacing the original equipment ones. And how do I know this?
Well, taking a peek in the trunk shows the spare with the untouched original tire in it, a Goodyear Eagle GA. Just tuck that bad boy back under the rug, re-install the cargo net for whatever small items you want to bring along, then load up the luggage back here and slam the lid closed, we are ready to go!
The new New Yorker was introduced at the same time as the LHS but as a driver’s car, the LHS was better simply due to its bucket seat interior. Who wants to sit three-abreast up front all the way across the country, no thanks. As a matter of fact, maybe I don’t want to drive, just get in here, recline all the way and take a nap. If the AC would fire up that might be a good idea, but in the 111 degree heat of this particular day that’d be a hard prerequisite.
The black leather and dash work well with the ’90’s plastiwood that’s fairly restrained both in usage and patterning when compared to some of Detroit’s more egregious sins of years past in that regard. Console shifter for a more “yoooropeeen” feel but there wasn’t a manual shift mode on these as with some of its stablemates as I seem to recall. The keys are even in it, the weather has warmed the engine halfway to operating temp, it doesn’t get any readier than this.
The Chrysler Infinity sound system was pretty good back in the day and I could probably scrounge a decent CD collection from various trunks in this yard to get me home entertained. I don’t mind a good touchscreen but I do admit that the equalizer knob sliders and joystick balance/fade control here are mighty tempting. And the HVAC controller with that temperature knob looks very useful too. However how anyone thinks they can adjust or select any of that without looking way down to the bottom of the console is beyond me, this is more complex than in a very basic car too.
But perhaps letting a different family member drive might be even better, just look at that back seat! Arm rest, air vents, no cupholder but I guess there’s a reason humans have two hands and like to man-spread…Or look into a few other cars and find one of those center hump cupholder tray things in black to blend in here.
72,683 miles! This thing still smells sort of new. That’s a good-looking set of gauges, shared with the Eagle Vision as seen here in one that ran out of gas just prior to the 200,000 mark. I’d be happy to push those dials toward the right.
The venerable 3.5l 24V V6 put out a healthy for the day 214hp and 221lb-ft of torque, all routed through a 4-speed automatic while using regular gas. No problem chirping the tires or climbing the grades on the way home while slicing through the thin air without much noise.
Never mind the splash of yellow yard-paint, that’ll come right off with five minutes and a claybar while filling the tank to leave town. Better leave early though as it gets mighty dark in the desert and those stylish headlights sucked so bad they were redesigned for the next model year.
Our neighbors to the North (that’d be Canada for those of you learning remotely and thus not learning much at all) are pretty good at building Chrysler’s big cars up in Brampton, Ontario, where they currently build the LX-platform cars (300, Charger, Challenger). This one was even built toward the tail end of the model year just in case there were some bugs to be worked out.
A full tank of gas, then run’er through the gas station’s $5 with fill-up car wash and this beauty is ready to hit the open road right after you go inside and stock up on a 64ouncer of ice and sweet tea to nurse during the drive home. Like I said, I know I wouldn’t hesitate based on what I’m seeing here and I doubt you would either. This thing’s a creampuff.
Wow! Assuming the car is mechanically in the same condition as cosmetically, someone couldn’t have donated this car to Goodwill or some other like charity that could repurpose it? Heck, I’d take it for awhile just for the experience of having owned one.
I wouldn’t be surprised if, like Jim alluded to, the Covid restrictions/hassles, played some role here. I’ve been seeing quite a few examples of folks clearing out relatives’ houses (i.e., like if an older relative moves out of a house), and they just take all the furniture to the curb with a sign saying something like “free or trash,” or just call a junk removal company to throw it all in a dumpster. This LHS could well be an automotive equivalent of that phenomenon… then again, it could have some hidden problem that’s not obvious to us.
The wrecking yard is where many of those donated cars end up. If they run and drive properly they might put them up for sale on their sales lot, assuming they actually have one. But many go directly to the wrecking yard and the charity gets a check.
I got my Cutlass Ciera from a charity, and although I love the thing sometimes i wish they did scrap the thing
> This here still works for me, even with the semi-formal roofline, thank goodness the backlight isn’t starkly vertical, that was tres passé by 1994.
This is what I found appealing about the first-gen LHS – it was obviously styled by someone who disliked the broughamed-out aesthetic of the previous-generation New Yorker/Fifth Avenue that this car replaced, yet also knew they had to hold onto some of those buyers as those cars were quite popular. The result is that “semi-formal” roofline that managed to look curvy and ’90s modern even as the backlight was nearly vertical. But it still offered the advantages of the “sheer look” popularized by the 1975 Cadillac Seville and made ubiquitous by other GM cars over the following decade – easy ingress/egress through squared-off doors, a huge backseat with ample headroom, a rear window that stays clean, and a huge trunk opening.
And yes, this car is in too amazing shape to be junked, although I’m guessing the drivetrain needs some major repair that the owner thought too expensive to repair.
Tidy looking cars with little apparently wrong with them in wrecking yards is not unusual here, be they either inspection failures or unsaleable trade ins lots of useable cars are seen enroute to pull your own wrecking yards here, it is easier to replace a car than have it repaired when your used ex JDM car inevitably breaksdown and they do with crippling regularity,
they are the disposable car here, cheap to buy cheap to run and not worth fixing when they stop because you have to translate everything and there is only the wrecking yard industry for spare parts nothing new is around for lots of them so why bother get another one.
“your used ex JDM car inevitably breaksdown and they do with crippling regularity,”
Apparently the harsh New Zealand climate and Kiwi owners are taking their toll. Those same JDM cars last decades under brutal conditions in Siberia (-40C cold starts for years on end, moon-scape roads).
I can attest to these as pretty great road cars for their time. My grandparents bought a ’94 in emerald green with tan interior to replace an ’89 New Yorker, which my former mother-in-law purchased from them at trade-in price. Since they were getting up there in age, I’d drive them from NJ to Vermont each year for an extended family Thanksgiving weekend in their car. Coming out of my commuter Jetta, the LHS felt HUGE for the first few miles, but on the NY Thruway it was an absolute joy, and once we crossed over the border into Vermont its handling was more than adequate in the mountain twisties. At the time I remember commenting that for such a big car it handled like it was on rails. Big cushy heated buckets, a great sound system and set-and-forget climate control made it a great ride for a long-ish trip. But yeah, those headlights sucked.
Interesting find. It certainly is fun to speculate how exactly it ended up here.
Obviously a mechanical malady of some sort, but it could be someone in need of quick cash after finding out that Carvana won’t buy a 26-year-old car.
My guess: Either the problematic Ultradrive transmission or possibly the A/C, mandatory in Phoenix as you pointed out. The latter would have been an early R-134a system (Chrysler having just switched over the previous year), which may have had some teething pains. In either case, repairs could quickly exceed the value of the car.
In any case, these were not well-built cars. You can see misaligned plastics all over the interior in Jim’s photos, and I can assure you this is not a result of age. My father had a 1993 Concorde that he purchased new, and his came from the factory with rattly door panels, misaligned trim pieces, and even one mismatched door panel (one had a cloth insert, and the other three had leather). Oh, and the headlight on the Concorde were terrible too.
Good guess with the a/c system. I’ve had two cars where a malfunctioning a/c system (and a high repair cost) contributed to my decision to sell them… and I don’t even live in a perpetually hot climate like Arizona.
Yeah chances are the AC died long ago and once the trans started acting up it wasn’t worth repairing.
Lived in Tucson for a time; I bet it’s the A/C myself. What’s the weather like today there? 95. No A/C would make this car undrivable 10 months out of the year, full stop. You could try and sell it, but who would risk the task of ripping out whatever only for it to fail to remedy the problem? It’s not worth it on such a low value car. Junked.
The real mileage may actually be 172,000 – or more. This is a non interference engine with a forged crank. Our ’96 New Yorker is still going strong with 108,000 miles…on the original transmission. The key to long transmission life in these cars is changing the fluid and filter every 40,000 miles or so.
It’s a six digit odometer and has a “0” displayed ahead of the 72,xxx miles so that’s unlikely. The condition easily supports the displayed mileage too. Does your New Yorker only have a 5-digit odo? That’d be odd.
You got me there, I had forgotten about the six digit odometer. I’m gonna try to get a 3 or a 4 at the left end of mine.
These LH cars were so comfortable. My family had a 94 Concorde with the 3.3 and a few options. And then in 2002 we got a 1996 Concorde LXi in the typical 90s dark green with the 3.5. And that was an amazing car! The Concorde didn’t have quite as plush seats as the LHS, but they were incredible, and I know the LHS was even more comfortable. I am guessing that the transmission is what did this one in. And like Tom said, the AC system in these often had issues. They didn’t always last too long. Which is too bad as the rest of the car is simply outstanding.
I suspect a bad transmission, which is what took down a lot of these in their prime.
The junkyards are no dummies. If a cream puff comes in and it’s working mostly right, they will either sell it out front or wholesale it out. They will make more on it that way. A car like this will not make much from selling stripped parts from it, and will end up getting crushed mostly as it sits, which means more work for the yard operator to strip the waste materials (interior parts, oil, etc).
If this were sold whole, it would not get a lot, but some poor family would get a nice, cheap ride, for a while, anyway, until the transmission went out.
The air conditioner may not have been reliable but it sucked up the BTUs. A coworker had one in the mid-90s that five us us would go to lunch in, 100° at noon, and I’d sit in the commodious back seat with the front arm rest vent blowing in my face. Very comfortable.
I would also guess transmission failure with at least one side order of electrical gremlins. Those seats looks to die for. Perfect man cave furniture.
Me thinks those seats would be perfect for my ’83 Ranger 4×4, with it’s first and one year only black interior.
I had the same thing happen to me a few years back. I was trolling around my local wrecking yard and stumbled upon a 1980 Buick Skylark (FWD X-car) in this nice of condition, and not a single part missing. Didn’t catch the mileage. We all know the first X-cars were piles, no need to beat that horse again, but sheese…
I got a ride in a relative of this, a 2002(?) Concorde that my wife’s grandparents inherited from a great aunt of hers. 52k miles. I don’t know whether it was one of the infamous 2.7L cars. Got a ride in the back seat from Massillon Ohio up to Cleveland for a 4th of July weekend at the Horseshoe Casino up there, with in-op AC. Super comfy highway cruiser, the overstuffed back seat was a vestige of classic American cars of decades past.
Love this generation of LHS. To my eyes this car still looks great today, especially the interior. I test drove two of them back in ’97. I could not come to a price with either of the dealers, and I was a little leery of possible reliability issues.
I ended up with a ’95 Bonneville. It had it’s own reliability issues. But I learned how to change an intake manifold, (twice) and what the term “hydrolocked” means.
I’ll go with the prevailing sentiment and say the most likely culprit is the transmission, followed by the A/C. Either way, if someone had the necessary skills and access to a decent, low-cost parts donor, replacing either would render a fine ride on the cheap.
But there likely aren’t a whole of wrenches out there willing to put in the time, money, and effort on a car with such a low resale value. A shame, because it otherwise looks pretty decent.
Now it may be different due to the laws in AZ, but in WA all of the self serve wrecking yards have a builder/driver row, usually right where you enter the yard. Some of them are drivers as is, others may have a mechanical issue, but the car is worth enough that someone might want to repair it. Many yards will also do things like give you 10% off any parts from the yard that you might need to repair it. I’ve seen others sell you a “kit” where they include the parts needed in the listed price.
As others have mentioned the AC wasn’t that reliable and the transmission’s durability is well known. So those are the most likely reasons that it ended up here.
The car looks to be in great shape, given its surroundings, but:
• ProbleMatic transmission.
• Leak-prone fuel rails.
• Leak-prone, costly, difficult A/C evaporator.
• Short-lived suspension bushings.
• Useless headlamps (yes, even these big ones on the LHS/NYer).
Eh…pass.
Years ago, getting parts for my daughter’s Olds at the pick-a-part. The car I was pulling parts off of was a twin to hers, but far better condition. Crayoned on the windshield was “no brakes”. Sometimes it doesn’t take much.
An example of when less is more…
3.3 engine vs 3.5
I had the 3.3 in my Intrepid, it was a great engine with terrific low end pull.
Nice! On the name, my guess is that it stood for LH (the platform) Special. This is just a guess, though.
Another reason this car may have ended up here is that it is worth almost nothing and no 65 year old heir (even if local) wanted to meet strangers teeming with Covid in order to get a few infected hundred dollar bills.
But then again, other than the 3.5 V6, these were kind of brittle cars as they aged. Which is too bad because they were quite nicely turned out. And I miss that “manufactured by Chrysler Corporation”. Was the Daimler thing over 20 years ago now? Yikes.
That’s my guess too, but whatever the S stood for, the model name was disappointing. Other LH-platform cars got distinctive and exciting names, but the flagship was saddled with a reference to the platform’s developmental code name, which was quite likely meaningless? Ugh. They could have done much better.
Maybe LHS stood for “Let’s Have Sex”. No probably not.
As someone who had the pain of having to service these cars just as they came out of warranty, I can fully understand what it has been scrapped:
-Horrid transmission.
-Horrid a/c system.
-Horrid brakes.
-Horrid suspension, the whole shebag falls apart the day after the warranty is up. The exhaust manifolds literally cook the upper suspension and steering parts.
-Horrid electrics. Tracing a short on one of these is not for the impatient.
-Horrid battery placement. The LH front wheel has to be removed/
-Horrid air intake placement: get this! It faces downward! Go through a big puddle and boom goes the motor! Saw two of these in a year.
It was all quite a shame because when these cars were new, they drove really well and had a European vibe to them. I had a few LH rentals and I like them all but I wasn’t fixing on them, either.
Great find! I’m still trying to figure out why somebody goes to AZ for vacation in the summer and spends it in junkyards:)
Like everyone else, I am distressed by such a primo creampuff on deathrow. I understand intellectually how that could happen and assume it is a rational decision, but emotionally it pains me.
I agree maybe it was dead AC that doomed it. When I lived in AZ in my early driving years, I had a few cars without working AC. I would have jumped at a car like this if it was really cheap, even without it. These snowflakes are so fragile now, can’t take a little heat;)
If that car arrived at one of the Pick n Pulls around me, and looked like that, it would have been put up front just after paying your $2 and have a price on the front window. Like this…
Or this one which was wildly overpriced once you got close and peered into it. What’s a old 440 worth…?
Most of ours in Denver used to to that as well. After Covid hit they all stopped. I finally saw one put a car out in front again a couple of weeks ago. Nobody had used cars going on at the Phoenix PNPs while, and they were all extremely barricaded/masked. This Chrysler was at the same chain’s that usually does do that, so I’m guessing it’s perhaps a temporary thing for now.
Out here you get to see them before you pay to enter…
Well I had the occasion to go to one of the local Pick-N-Pull locations for the first time this year. I can confirm they are still selling complete cars. The most interesting of which is below.
trying again.
Seeing the front shot of the car made me nostalgic for the Chrysler Pentastar.
I love the looks of this car and I feel it was the inspiration for the 98 Lincoln. The Lincoln is like a bigger bloated lhs. If cars grew up and became bigger and lost their looks like some pretty girls do. Shame we could not have lhs looks and Lincoln mechanicals.
Great find. I was into Japanese cars at the time but if I would have been looking for a US model, this would have been near the top. As I mentioned in a previous COAL, I had a ’99 LHS and loved it…
LHS? Maybe (Bob) Lutz’ Homerun Sedan? Nah, Iacocca would have never gone for it…:-)
Unconscionable that such a serviceable vehicle ends up like this. Know this is a daily occurrence in a disposable society where GDP growth curve is gospel but for me, “no lo comprende!”
Count me in for the trip – don’t leave without me – I’m on the way!
The best attributes of this car was the quiet cushy, spacious interior combined with adequate performance and handling. Do they even make cars like this anymore? I will agree that it is probably a bad transmission that killed this car. I had a ’96 Town and Country LXI another top of the line cruiser. It had that same Infinity sound system which was awesome. It also had a problematic transmission. How do these compare with later Town Cars?
A Toyota Avalon or Lexus ES is about as close as an example I can think of.