Junkyard Find: 2004 Kia Spectra With 448,559 Miles

The era of widespread usage of solid-state electronic odometer displays began in the mid-to-late 1990s, which means I don't write about many discarded high-mile vehicles from our current century. Today, we've got a welcome exception: this Kia now residing in a Denver-era car graveyard with close to a half-million miles on the clock.

Most manufacturers didn't switch to six-digit mechanical odometers for US-market vehicles until the early 1980s or much later (for most Detroit machinery). Electronic odometers hit the mainstream in the middle 1990s and were near-universal by the turn of the century.

You see the towing company's paint-pen mileage figure on the windshield? I probably wouldn't have caught that, but Mason at Unloved Cars of Colorado has a sharp eye for such things and got busy with the detective work the moment he saw this car.

After a VIN search, Mason learned that this car had been auctioned off for $325 on November 5th. According to the auction listing, the car showed warning lights, and it cranked but wouldn't start.

Knowing I'd be interested, he sent me a tip about this extraordinarily well-traveled South Korean (Mason has helped me in this way on numerous occasions, including with another very interesting Kia at the very same boneyard). I was pleased to find that the auction site had an odometer photo I could borrow, because you need an odometer photo to get most people to look at high-mile-junkyard-car stories.

When I went to visit this car, I dug through the glovebox paperwork and learned quite a few things about its final owner. I was not surprised to find a thick stack of receipts for maintenance and repairs, showing that the oil was always changed on the dot and minor problems got fixed as they popped up. You can't keep a car alive long past 100K miles if you don't do those things.

That's why I almost never find completely trashed hoopties in junkyards with intergalactic miles on the odometer; cars that get neglected and/or abused don't last very long. This one has a bit of rust but otherwise looks like your typical disposable fleetmobile that served 20 years on a short commute and finally threw a rod after its oil reached 85,000 miles.

My theory is that you need two of the following three things to get a vehicle to live past 200,000 miles:

1. Great engineering and build quality
2. Meticulous maintenance and repairs
3. Extremely good luck

You could avoid those requirements yet still accomplish the feat with an unlimited bankroll and maniacal persistence, if you wanted to prove to the world that, say, a Sterling 825 could be driven 448,560 miles.

Hyundais and Hyundai-era Kias have become very solid machines in recent years, sure, but the Spectra is a cheapskate-mobile from the transition period between Good Enough For The Price Hyundai and Actually Really Good Hyundai (both of which came after I Should Have Bought The Yugo Instead Of This Hyundai). So I'm going to say that the owner of this car benefited from the #2 and #3 items on my list above.

For what it's worth, this car now sits in 15th place on the Murilee Martin Junkyard Odometer Standings list, between a 465k-mile Toyota Previa and a 445k-mile Datsun 210. It becomes the top South Korea-built car as well, but it only had to beat a 317k-mile Ford Festiva to accomplish that feat.

This car averaged better than 21,200 miles for each of its years on the road, which checks out for an I-25 commute between Greeley (where it lived) and either Denver or Fort Collins. Its registration documents indicated that its final owner bought it in 2009.

The Spectra was popular with rental fleets, but the manual transmission in this one rules out that origin. The manual also helped keep it alive, because clutch replacements are much cheaper than automatic transmission jobs.

Yes, a cheap econo-sedan that lucked into a caring owner with a low-stress highway commute. Why did it end up at Colorado Auto & Parts? Here's where our story takes a sad turn.

The red tag issued in October by the City of Greeley told me that either the caring owner sold or gave away the car and the new owner abandoned it after it wouldn't start… or something happened that left the car without its caring owner.

A search of the Dylan-listening owner's name got me the story: he was knock knock knockin' on heaven's door in April and it took six months for the city to drag away his ol' reliable Kia after the Pearly Gates opened up for him (I couldn't find any Bob Dylan songs about Korean cars, sorry). Perhaps Tom Waits will read this and write a Greeley Spectra-themed sequel to Ol' 55 entitled Ol' 04 (no, the Eagles did not write Ol '55, nor did Bruce Springsteen write Jersey Girl), at which point I'll go back and add the link here.

I usually give Spectras a bit of a glance when I'm in the junkyard, because the factory radios in the late-2000s ones are among the very few junkyard head units that have an AUX jack but don't require proprietary CAN Bus codes to operate in a car-parts boombox of the sort I've been known to build (the lack of CAN-based starter interlocks in 2010s Hyundais and Kias is also the reason they're so easy to steal).

The Spectra, which was called the Cerato in its homeland, was not a memorable car (although this publication reviewed it back in 2007). It succeeded the Sephia, and when the Cerato entered its second generation it was called the Forte in the United States. The Forte managed to stick around all the way until… 2024? Yes, it did.

Really, it's just another generic mid-2000s sedan, from an era during which sedans became less relevant by the second.

Farewell, high-mile Spectra.

2004 Kia Spectra in Colorado junkyard.

2004 Kia Spectra in Colorado junkyard.

2004 Kia Spectra in Colorado junkyard.

2004 Kia Spectra in Colorado junkyard.

2004 Kia Spectra in Colorado junkyard.

2004 Kia Spectra in Colorado junkyard.

2004 Kia Spectra in Colorado junkyard.

2004 Kia Spectra in Colorado junkyard.

2004 Kia Spectra in Colorado junkyard.

2004 Kia Spectra in Colorado junkyard.

2004 Kia Spectra in Colorado junkyard.

2004 Kia Spectra in Colorado junkyard.

2004 Kia Spectra in Colorado junkyard.

2004 Kia Spectra in Colorado junkyard.

2004 Kia Spectra in Colorado junkyard.

2004 Kia Spectra in Colorado junkyard.

2004 Kia Spectra in Colorado junkyard.

2004 Kia Spectra in Colorado junkyard.

[Images: The Author]

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