This struck me as odd. Hyundai junkyard content.

Was at the junkyard today picking up a few parts for a friends' car when I happened upon this Hyundai Excel. It seemed remarkably clean... probably the nicest Hyundai Excel I've ever seen. No rust, straight body, very clean interior. It was around then that I noticed that the odometer reads 20 miles. A check of the glove box produces the pre-delivery inspection papers - 3 copies - all blank. It appears this is a new, never titled car? Interestingly, the VIN tags are missing.

Any thoughts on what the story is with this thing?

My high school had a Honda Accord like that. It had been donated by Honda to the auto tech program and had some ridiculously low miles on it along with no VIN tags so it could never been titled.

Korean zombie death car?

Stolen off the new car lot and stashed? Then the thief realized how miserable an Excel with an automatic was and abandoned it?

I would bet transmission woes.

You know, a 4g63 is a fairly easy swap

The VIN tags are missing by way of sawzall!

bluesideup wrote: My high school had a Honda Accord like that. It had been donated by Honda to the auto tech program and had some ridiculously low miles on it along with no VIN tags so it could never been titled.

Dollars to donuts, this is what happened.

Its numbered. Danica used to drive number 91 and someone immediately realized it was useless.

I'm kind of glad that no one ever had to drive that very far.

bluesideup wrote: My high school had a Honda Accord like that. It had been donated by Honda to the auto tech program and had some ridiculously low miles on it along with no VIN tags so it could never been titled.

Ahh I didn't think of that. I bet it is something like that.

Test car or Tech school car would be my guess. Seats look nice, might want grab them.

The brand new car was delivered to the new owner at the dealership. After driving it home and parking it overnight. The owner woke up.. Only to find the wheels and tires missing.

The insurance company after seeing the cost of replacing the wheels and tires... Decided to write off the car then sell what was left to the junk yard..

Flood/hurricane damage; partially submerged, written off?

bluesideup wrote: My high school had a Honda Accord like that. It had been donated by Honda to the auto tech program and had some ridiculously low miles on it along with no VIN tags so it could never been titled.

There's a VoTech school in Pennsylvania that has (or had) a Viper donated like that. Come to think of it they also had a turbo Cosworth Indy Car engine...

The vo-tech school where we do some of our training has two or three 3.5l Malibus like that, and one day there were seven or eight brand new 4200 Vortecs on pallets.

The car is almost certainly a donation.

Presuming that it is a non-production car donated to a school or similar, the next question is where has it been/what has it been doing for 22 years and why?

Gathering dust at a school, of course.

Have any schools in your area closed, recently?

Mitsubishi had a 3000GT vr4 spyder the last time I was there $68,424 msrp

Josh wrote: Presuming that it is a non-production car donated to a school or similar, the next question is where has it been/what has it been doing for 22 years and why?

We had a few donated vehicles at my school. They basically would be moved once every week or two from the parkinglot into a bay if it was needed for a class. While I was in school, Kia donated a new Sorento. It was pretty logical since Kia built a plant a couple hours south of Atlanta a few years ago.

I never checked to see if they had VINs but I know the school cannot sell ANY vehicle donated to the school. It has to be crushed or scraped.

makes sense. After it has been disassembled and reassembled a few hundred times to teach students the basics of car repair.. would you want to buy it?

I've seen shipment damaged cars donated to schools. Here's the deal: damage over a certain percentage of the car's value means it's almost impossible to sell, many manufacturers put a 3% cap on it. It goes back to the doctor in Alabama? who discovered that, IIRC, $750 in bodywork had been done to his car before he bought it, he sued BMW and won some stupid amount of money in damages.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/94-896.ZO.html

So maybe it had underbody damage which exceeded the threshold, was written off and then donated. That would explain the Sawzalled VIN.

OBTW: the car was probably worth $6000 new, 3% of $6000 is $180.00. Doesn't take much of a hit to do that!

The shipping company noticed hyunadi's check bounced, so they slashed all their shipments tires.....that'd do it.