Scrapyard Gem: 2007 Renault Mégane Coupé Cabriolet

During the first decade of our current century, plenty of European car shoppers fell hard for hardtop convertibles based on cheap compact cars. That means that those cars are now easy to find in the scrapyards of the United Kingdom, so I headed over to northern England to document some of them. We've taken a look at a 2006 Peugeot 307 CC and a 2005 Vauxhall Tigra TwinTop from that trip, and now it's the turn of the open-air Renault Mégane

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The Mégane first hit showrooms as a 1996 model, with the first generation based on the platform of the Renault 19. For the second-generation Mégane II, which debuted as a 2003 model, the same Renault-Nissan platform that underpinned the Sentra and Rogue was used.

The Coupé Cabriolet version of the Mégane II shared just a few of its front body components with its hatchback sibling.

The rear half looked so good that BYD copied it for its S8 convertible, which got a snout lifted from the Mercedes-Benz CLK-Class for good measure.

Power for the 2007 Mégane came from a wide variety of straight-four engines driving the front wheels. There were petrol engines ranging from 1.4 liters to 2.0 liters of displacement and diesels of 1.5 through 2.0 liters. This car has the 1.6-liter petrol engine, rated at 116 horsepower.

The transmission is a five-speed manual. Six-speed manuals and four-speed automatics were available as well.

When Copart (owner of the U-Pull-It yard in York) tried to sell this car at auction, it had 84,989 miles on the odometer and a bit of not-so-severe rear body damage. The interior looked nice at that time.

The front body components were in great shape, so scrapyard shoppers bought many of them.

You'll find one in every car, even in England. The Car-Freshner tree-shaped air freshener line is a bit different on the other side of the Atlantic; English-speaking regions mostly get Little Trees, areas with Latin-derived languages usually get Arbres Magiques and residents of areas that use Germanic and Scandinavian tongues (besides English) plus Slavic and Baltic languages tend to have access to Wunder-Baums.

Even with the top up, there's still a big moonroof.