Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. a worn-out, useless car, occas. aeroplane (see cit. 1942).

1942

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1942		C.R. Bond 4 Mar. in A Flying Tiger’s Diary (1984) 122: Newkirk’s Second Squadron swapped a couple of good P-40s for our two clunkers.
1950		Associated Press 18 Feb. n.p.: Before you sell a clunker [an old car] to the junkman [...] smash the transmission [W&F].
1954		(con. 1940) C. Chessman Cell 2455 179: I can dump this clunker as soon as we can get hold of my car.
1962		D. Dempsey ‘Lang. of Traffic Policemen’ in AS XXXVII:4 267: bucket of bolts, n. phr. klunker, n. An old rattletrap car or truck.
1964		The Beach Boys ‘This Car of Mine’ 🎵 Thought I could tell / Under the coat of rust she was gold, / No clunker.
1978		A. Maupin Tales of the City (1984) 76: The parking lot [...] was jammed with vehicles: flowered hippie vans, city clunkers, organic pickups.
1983		S. King Christine 31: That old clunker of a car. [Ibid.] 33: You’ll need every penny of it before you’re through with that clunk.
2002		Church of the Ressurection 22 Mar. 🌐 How many of us treat our spiritual journey like we are driving a cheap, old klunker on a neglected country road?
2003		Mad mag. Jan. 18: We drove to Mexico City in his old clunker.
2017		T. Pluck Bad Boy Boogie [ebook] ‘You want me to show you how to handle that old clunker of yours?’ Ramona said. ‘We can’t all have James Bond cars’.

2. anything useless, unattractive, incompetent.

1949

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1949		F. Brown Dead Ringer 172: Don’t jump into this, Rita. You might be buying a clunker.
1960, 1975		Wentworth & Flexner DAS.
1971		L. Bangs in Psychotic Reactions (1988) 14: I believe that record – no, the whole band, that’s right – is one of the all-time clunkers of history.
1989		H. Rawson Dict. of Invective (1991) 47: clunkhead. Popularized by Arthur Godfrey on radio and television in the early 1950s (Dictionary of American Slang, 1975); possibly from clunker, for anything that is old, beat-up, and doesn’t work well.
1995		C. Hiaasen Stormy Weather 238: Morganna — what a clunker of a name to remember in the heat of passion!
2000		T. Blacker Kill Your Darlings 158: A list of titles, including such clonkers as Terpischore of Life [...] was drawn up.
2000		Indep. on Sun. 5 Mar. 21: Perhaps it’s a hangover from that old Leon Uris clunker Exodus.
2000		R.G. Barrett Leaving Bondi (2013) [ebook] [A]nybody that would invest money in a clunker like Leaving Bondi would have shit for brains.