When I was a kid, my friends and I discovered a wrecked 1941 Oldsmobile Coupe deep in the woods behind my house. It was unbelievably cool for a seven-year-old, even if my efforts to turn it into a secret clubhouse were only rewarded with a tetanus shot and a scolding. But that was over twenty years ago, and when I went out there recently to check it out the forest had completely taken over. It belongs to the earth now-just like this haunting Toyota A70 Supra that's been left to the mountain spirits after sliding off a twisty road in Japan long ago.
Alexi Smith, an Australian drifter and blogger living in Japan, heard rumors in the community about a crashed Supra somewhere at an "undisclosed location" in the mountains and set off to investigate. After a little bit of Blair Witch-style camera work, he spots the A70 far below at the bottom of a steep, rocky hillside and clambers down to check it out. It's at least a couple hundred feet down from the road, embedded in the dirt and leaves at the bottom of the slope. The rear glass is broken and the driver's door is open, so the inside is completely exposed, not to mention thoroughly stripped and trashed. The rollcage suggests there might be something more sinister under the hood than the stock engine, though.
All things considered, though, the body is pretty intact and it's still got wheels. That's what makes it such a bizarre sight-we're used to seeing classic cars disintegrate in the wild, but something that was made less than 30 years ago feels too new to be abandoned like that. The story of how it got there is still floating around, not yet lost to time, and I'm immensely curious. One YouTube commenter-obligatory grain of salt-claims they know the story, that the driver crashed it in the early 1990's while doing his best (or worst) touge impression and decided to spend the towing cost on other projects. Plausible, at least.
Another thing I'm wondering is that given the mountain racing and drifting culture in Japan, how many other ghostly Toyotas, Hondas, and Mitsubishis are scattered across the hills, slowly sinking into the dirt? Now there's an important archaeological expedition if I've ever heard one.