When a certain type of vehicle is especially beloved in a particular region, there comes a time when that vehicle's longtime aficionados move on to newer hardware, and that's when those who spend a lot of time crawling through high-inventory-turnover, self-service wrecking yards-- as I do-- notice a steady torrent of those vehicles passing through the yard and then on to The Crusher.

For at least a decade, the Volvo 240 has been an extremely common sight in San Francisco Bay Area wrecking yards (presumably because the core Bay Area Volvo 240-loving demographic has since made the transition to the Toyota Prius). In the Denver area, where I've lived since 2010, the XJ Jeep Cherokee is that vehicle.

Most XJ Cherokees I see in Colorado wrecking yards are fairly complete and in solid-looking condition. Murilee Martin

The story among XJ fanatics is that the Cash For Clunkers program in 2009 devoured nearly every XJ Cherokee on the planet, with The Crusher actually growing legs and roaming the land as it sought to glut its appetite for American Motors-turned-Chrysler steel, while a hateful chorus of power-hungry government bureaucrats laughed uproariously and dumped bales of cash onto a bonfire.

In fact, the four-wheel-drive XJ Cherokee was the sixth-most-clunkerized vehicle (its successor, the Grand Cherokee, made third place), and enough remained for the real XJ-destroying culprit -- harsh depreciation of a platform dating back to the early 1980s-- to do good business for the following half-decade. At the peak of Cash For Clunkers, high-end German sedans and big Japanese luxury cars with pink spray paint on their engines seemed nearly as numerous as Explorers and Cherokees.

There has been a steady flow of XJ Cherokees in self-service wrecking yards in the post-Cash-For-Clunkers era. Murilee Martin

The AMC 4.0 straight-six engine, which is what you'll find in many of these junked Cherokees, is a rugged and torque-heavy powerplant that is well-suited for swapping into AMC race cars, but it's a rare junkyard Cherokee that gives up many parts before being fed into The Crusher's cold steel jaws. Much as most of the hordes of old Subarus that populate Denver wrecking yards have few parts to offer a well-sated marketplace for used parts, a no-longer-loved XJ Cherokee is mostly valued for its scrap-metal potential.

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