Want a Slightly Wet, New Mazda? Tough Luck

A few months ago I read a fascinating article in Wired about the Cougar Ace, a freighter that was disabled and sank two years ago with nearly 5000 new Mazda automobiles inside. The story focused on the team of rugged salvagers who managed to refloat the vessel and save it.

But what happened to those cars? On Neatorama, I found out the answer, from an article in the WSJ on April 29. Despite pleas from movie makers who wanted to blow them up, schools who wanted to use the cars for shop classes and other people who just wanted a really cheap new car, they decided to crush all 4703 of them in Portland Oregon recently.

They blew up all of the airbags with detonators and drained, gutted squished and shredded each shiny new Mazda 3 that came up from the airtight hull of the Cougar Ace. It turned out that fears of being sued trumped any good will gestures they might have considered in disposing of the cars.

Ford, Mazda's parent company, "also worried that scammers might find a way to spirit the cars abroad to sell as new. That happened to thousands of so-called "Katrina cars" salvaged from New Orleans' flooding three years ago. Those cars -- their electronics gone haywire and sand in the engines -- were given a paint job and unloaded in Latin America on unsuspecting buyers, damaging auto makers' reputations."

The company did manage to salvage the valuable catalytic converters but they punctured all of the new tires, and sliced the alloy rims in two, to make sure nobody tried to resell them. The rest of the vehicles become pieces of metal no bigger than an ashtray, headed back to Asia where they will be remade--into new cars.