I had a run of eight of the last 12 Junkyard Find articles being GM products, and we’re finally going to take a break from The General… for now. Instead of a Trans Sport Montana or first-gen Cavalier, we’re going to follow up one gloom-inducing Great Recession vehicle with another: an ultra-rare example of the single-model-year Kia Borrego, found in a Denver car graveyard last week.
The folks at the Kia design center in Irvine, California (where I lowered the property values in decisive fashion with my hooptie Impala in 1990) came up with the Kia Mohave as their first project, introducing it to the world as the Kia Mesa concept car at the 2005 NAIAS.
The Mohave was named after the Native American tribe of the areas adjacent to the Colorado River in present-day California, Arizona and New Mexico (if you’re writing about the desert whose name uses the same pronunciation, you spell it Spanish-style, with a J). Kia decided to change the name to Borrego, after the desert region by that name in Southern California, for the North American version of the Mohave.
By the middle of the 2000s, the rule in the car industry was simple: sell trucks or die. After the humiliation of selling rebadged Isuzus from the middle 1990s through the early 2000s, Honda had managed to create the Acura MDX as a 2001 model. If economy-car-centric Honda could pull that off, so could the Hyundai Motor Company.
Hyundai plus its Kia subsidiary (bought in 1998 in the aftermath of Kia’s bankruptcy the year before) had no big SUVs to sell in North America during the middle 2000s. The Mohave/Borrego, a hefty body-on-frame truck that scaled in at well over two tons, would solve everything!
The only problem with that plan was something the suits in Seoul couldn’t anticipate: the collapse of the global economy in late 2007. Suddenly, thirsty full-frame SUVs were out and economical SUVs on unibody car chassis were in.
The MSRP started at just $26,245 for a Borrego LX 2WD with 3.8-liter V6 (that’s about $39,958 in 2025 dollars), which made it a couple grand cheaper than a new Ford Explorer. You could even get it with a 4.6-liter V8.
But it drank gas, not qualifying for Cash For Clunkers rebates for that reason.
The Borrego was sold for just a single model year in the United States, though Canadian sales continued through 2011. Elsewhere in the world, the first-generation Mohave was sold all the way through 2024 (with a couple of facelifts along the way).
The smaller Sorento, for which I have some affection due to my experience outrunning Hurricane Sandy across eight states in a rented one, remained the biggest SUV available in North America from Hyundai/Kia until the Palisade/ Telluride appeared as a 2020 model.
This one arrived here in pretty good shape for age 16.
The owner’s manual was still in the glovebox.
This seems to be a reminder of the slow data speeds that plagued the early smartphones, circa 2009.
2009 Kia Borrego in Denver junkyard.
2009 Kia Borrego in Denver junkyard.
2009 Kia Borrego in Denver junkyard.
2009 Kia Borrego in Denver junkyard.
2009 Kia Borrego in Denver junkyard.
2009 Kia Borrego in Denver junkyard.
2009 Kia Borrego in Denver junkyard.
2009 Kia Borrego in Denver junkyard.
2009 Kia Borrego in Denver junkyard.
2009 Kia Borrego in Denver junkyard.
2009 Kia Borrego in Denver junkyard.
2009 Kia Borrego in Denver junkyard.
2009 Kia Borrego in Denver junkyard.
[Images: The Author]
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