A 1989 Ford Taurus customized for a 2005 episode of Pimp My Ride turned up last weekend in a Pick-Your-Part junkyard in Wilmington, California, its wild paint job and custom touches still surprisingly intact after two decades of obscurity. The car, modified in Episode 37 of Xzibit’s MTV show, arrived in the yard’s inventory on Saturday. By now, the scavengers have almost certainly picked it clean.
The Taurus was originally built for a contestant named Rashaé Minor, whose on-show backstory cast her as an aspiring Hollywood stuntwoman. West Coast Customs gave the car a custom gauge cluster, theatrical doors, and an elaborate paint scheme — the full MTV treatment circa 2005.
The car was still wearing a West Coast Customs license plate frame when it showed up at Pick-Your-Part. That detail raises an obvious question: where has this thing been for 20 years? Sitting in a Hollywood storage lot, forgotten by everyone except the inventory gods of Southern California’s junkyard circuit?
Someone in the RADwood Facebook group spotted the listing first and shared photos that confirmed the match. The custom paint, though faded, is unmistakable. The interior still carries traces of the episode’s modifications. For a car that was already 16 years old when Xzibit’s crew got their hands on it, the Taurus held up better than anyone had a right to expect.
Then there’s the backstory, which unravels in the way so many reality TV narratives do when you pull the thread. Minor wasn’t exactly a hopeful nobody dreaming of Hollywood. She already had acting credits and two legitimate stunt roles — one in the 1996 Schwarzenegger film Jingle All the Way and another in the 1998 Nicolas Cage movie City of Angels. Both predated her Pimp My Ride appearance by nearly a decade.
That tracks with what former contestants and insiders have said over the years: the show’s casting was, let’s say, curated. Cars were sometimes sourced or staged. Backstories were shaped for television. None of that diminishes the entertainment value of watching a crew bolt a flat-screen TV and a fog machine into a rusted-out Buick, but it’s worth remembering what the show actually was — a vehicle for spectacle, not a documentary about car culture.
The Taurus itself was never a great car when it rolled off Ford’s assembly line, and no amount of custom paint was going to change that. First-generation Taurus sedans were competent family haulers in the late 1980s, revolutionary even by the standards of what Detroit was producing at the time. But by 2005, a 16-year-old example was exactly the kind of rolling wreck the show loved to dress up.
Now it sits in a Southern California boneyard, two dollars at the gate for anyone who wants to walk the rows and pull a door panel that once appeared on basic cable. As garage art, one of those custom doors might actually be worth the trip. As a car, the Taurus was finished long before it got here.
Twenty years is a long time. Long enough for an MTV show to become nostalgia, for a stunt actress’s career to go quiet, and for a junkyard-bound Ford to outlast the cultural moment that briefly made it famous. The custom paint held up. Everything else faded on schedule.
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