Originally published at: Incredible photo shows $1 million car burned to a crisp inside its trailer - Boing Boing
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So I’ve read that the concept car used some Pinto parts. Those small 1970s Fords had one heck of a reputation for blowing up, but typically there would be a collision involved…
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Contributed by Allan Rose Hill
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That’s 2,675,909.26 USD with inflation.
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The Autopian was there.
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They loooove that Probe/almost Mustang II design so freaking much I think they were more upset than the owners were. Appropriate that they were some of the last auto journalists to see it alive.
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Talk about beauty being subjective. It’s always tragic when unique objects are destroyed, but the car in question wasn’t a looker, IMO. Too many conflicting design choices.
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Bertoni meets American Space-Age bubble-glass excess.
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Thank you, I’m not the only one! I didn’t want to watch the video, so I searched for some images and that’s immediately what came to mind. (I had a Mustang II Hatchback in high school. Painted Ford Orange, that Probe could be mistaken for the same vehicle at a distance.)
Of course my Mustang didn’t have a stock engine. Dad and I rebuilt one out of his junkyard with an engine salvaged from one of our race cars. I’ll never understand how I managed to survived my teenage years!
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It’s owned by a Restoration Shop. Can’t they just restore it? /jk
I used to supply some odd cars for display for the owner of a car product business. One day, while at a show, the subject of trailer accidents came up and the owner told us how one time, he was involved in an accident while towing some recently restored show car and the trailer flipped over upside down into a ditch at the side of the road.
He got out of the car expecting to find the car a complete wreck, but when they opened the side door, the car was in perfect condition, sitting right-side-up while the trailer was upside down. Apparently it was only tied down front and back (no wheel bonnets). When the trailer flipped over, the car just stayed in one place and spun like a rotisserie.
When emergency crews got there, he tried get them to help get the car out first before flipping the trailer over. They insisted that the trailer had to be turned over NOW. So he watched as they SLOWLY flipped the trailer back over, and in the process, the car rolled over with the trailer and ended up on its roof.
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It looks like it could have been the inspiration for Elno’s wedge thing.
Elno: “I know what we’ll do. We will make it much bigger and even uglier!”
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Autopian’s got your back, again.
From everything I’ve read, that seems like a wise choice (that and avoiding any weather whatsoever). I am one of the few that actually likes the actual Mustang II design for the most part. I definitely prefer it over most Italian wedges and their clones.
Of course, I’ve never driven or even seen one, so maybe I’d think different in person.
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Thinking about it, it’s very unlikely it was a choice exactly, as that’s how we got all of our vehicles. “What’s in the junkyard that we can restore and/or put together?” I was in my late '20s before I had a vehicle that was all one year model. All these decades later there’s still something a little odd to me about the idea you can just go buy a car that’s fully assembled!
I was 16, so I liked any vehicle that was mine to drive! Looking back I think the best feature of that car, aside from the engine that never should have been put in a car for a teenager, was the spacious flat area that resulted from putting the back seats flat. 
(Perhaps that shouldn’t have been given to a teenager either.)
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When preparing to teach 6 kids how to drive, my dad bought a Mustang II with a 4-speed manual transmission. It was a color of red pretty close to that prototype car’s paint.
In the first model year, the gas tank’s filler was under the beltline, making it slow to fill up. They moved it to a position above the middle in the later years.
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Now I’m trying to remember what I had in mine. That was actually my second car, the first being a rebuilt (but not nearly as rebuilt) Pinto that I know for sure had a manual transmission. One big advantage of growing up with my dad, I got to learn to drive on a very wide variety of vehicles.
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But I was told that only Telsas catch fire. /s
Local newspaper says there may be suspicious circumstances. Headline says:
Ford Probe Investigation
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