Every now and then, a thought comes to me. If there were X amounts of a certain car sold in a particular country 30 years ago… Where are they all now? In the case of the 240Z, it’s not a difficult guess – they’re sitting on someone’s farm, or in someone’s back yard, rusted and virtually unrecognisable or unrecoverable. If not that, they’ve been bought up as parts cars. It’s not unusual these days for it to take three beatup Zeds to make one good example. Sure, there’s quite a few still on the roads, in varying states of care, but that’s definitely a fraction of the original amount.
So when I stumbled across this old article this morning about a farmer in rural Victoria (Australia) with nearly 20 examples – mostly in need of a lot of work, but not remotely beyond saving – sitting in a few sheds on his property, my heart skipped a beat. It’s a great read, so check it out!
Wow!
I have it on pretty good authority that there are indeed many such collections of JDM (and otherwise!) cars “out there”. To the degree, even, that there are supposed to be quite a number of Mazda Cosmo 110s hiding in sheds in the back blocks of Oz.
I know of another farmer in Victoria that has a whole paddock full of Valiants, sadly though some of them were burnt out from a bushfire and others have had parts stolen from them.