From busted Batmobiles to giant lightning machines, the wilderness is full of incredible inventions that have been left to rust in peace. Let's head into the wild and find them, as we check out the most unusual abandoned technology and vehicles in the world!
Comanche Reef: Subway Cars Used To Build Artificial Reef
If you go scuba diving off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina, you’ll find what looks like the remains of an underwater civilization, with a great public transport network.
Around 30-miles offshore, the seabed is home to 50 decaying subway cars from New York, that are covered in seaweed and swarming with fish. It looks like the lost city-metro of Atlantis, but the carriages were deliberately sunk 100ft underwater in 2002, when the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources decided to create an artificial coral reef on the ocean floor.
10-28-2020 Subway Car Dive (long video) by SC Diver The area’s flat seabed has barely any rocks or natural coral. So, there isn’t much food for fish to eat due to a lack of rock-dwelling crustaceans and mollusks, and the fish also have nowhere to hide from their predators. So, the so-called
Comanche Reef was created to become a new home for wildlife and attract more fish to the area. They removed each carriages’ windows and doors, and when the cars were sunk, they were soon colonized by mussels, shrimp and hungry fish to eat them. Artificial reefs like this can contain around 400-times more food for fish than a flat seabed, and today, the abandoned subway cars are absolutely teeming with life!
Aerotrain i80
On the outskirts of Chevilly, France, there’s a rusty, unassuming hangar that became home to an old hovercraft from the 1970s. This hunk of metal is the Aerotrain i80, a futuristic vehicle that was developed by the French engineer Jean Bertin.
Bertin built several prototypes with different aesthetics, but they all functioned like giant hovercrafts that floated on an air-cushion, a couple of inches above a specially-built monorail track that ran through the train’s body. As the train moved, it pumped air against the top and sides of the rail, which caused enough downforce to lift it up and enough sideways pressure to secure itself to the track. Regular trains are slowed down by the friction between the wheels and the rails, and commonly used models often top-out at around 100mph. But the
floating Aerotrain didn’t have to worry about this friction, so it could fly above its track at 267mph!The i80 was the final prototype, and it was ready in 1974. But Bertin had competition from another
highspeed train-system called TGV that was being developed by France’s national railway company, SNCF.
TGV trains ran on specialized high-speed tracks that could carry them at around 200mph, but they didn’t float, so they could also use existing slower tracks where building new ones would be too expensive. This made it far more cost-effective than the Aerotrain, and in 1974, the French government cancelled Bertin’s project and funded TGV instead. TGV is still used today, while most of the Aerotrains have been left to rust in warehouses, where they’ve been targeted by vandals and arsonists. However, the prototype 02 Aerotrain in the image below was rescued and displayed in a small museum in Versailles, and some of the monorails are still visible in the French countryside. So remnants of the abandoned project live on, and who knows, maybe someday the Aerotrain will fly again!
Abandoned Soviet Marx Generator
Some abandoned inventions are so mysterious, that it’s impossible to tell what they are, like a gigantic contraption left in a forest near Moscow, Russia. It looks like a spaceship that crash-landed on Earth, or the weirdest waterslide in the world.
Катушки Тесла в Подмосковье by Aleksandr Eremeev But in reality, the device is a
Marx Generator that sits inside the High Voltage Research Center; a science facility that was abandoned after the fall of the Soviet Union! This machine is designed to charge itself up with massive amounts of electricity, before using it to produce bolts of artificial lightning. Soviet scientists built it in the 1970s, to test how well power lines and aircraft would stand up to lightning strikes.
But the generator was extremely expensive to operate, so when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the newly-formed Russian government couldn’t afford to keep the facility running. This meant that the Research Centre was abandoned and left to gather dust. But its Marx Generator is still the largest in the world, and in 2014 the Russian government briefly turned it back on for a demonstration, to prove that it still works! You could say lightning can strike the same place more than once!
The American Dream
This next vehicle is as big as abandoned cars get! The American Dream is the longest stretch limo in the world, with a 100ft-long body that holds a hot tub, a helipad, and a hinge in the middle to go around corners.
It was built in 1986 by Jay Ohrberg, a car designer who famously developed the DeLorean from Back to the Future. He hoped Hollywood Studios would rent the limo and use it in their movies, but it was incredibly expensive to maintain and a nightmare to park, so nobody wanted to hire it. In the late ‘90s, Jay gave up on his Dream and abandoned the limo outside a warehouse in New Jersey. He thought the abandoned vehicle would sit there and rot away forever, but he did put it on eBay in case anyone else wanted it. Around 20-years later in 2014, a man called Mike Manning bought it for an undisclosed sum to restore it, but he discovered that he couldn’t afford the extensive work the car needed. So in 2019 he sold it to Michael Dezer, the owner of a huge vehicle collection that’s kept at the Orlando Auto Museum in Florida. Dezer had the funds to
fix the limo, and 3-years and $250,000 later, the Dream was alive again! The car has been fully restored to full-working condition, and today, you can see the world’s longest limo for yourself at the Orlando Auto Museum!
Train Cemetery In Uyuni
Out in the Salar de Uyuni salt flat in Bolivia, lies a cemetery with over 100-bodies, decaying under the sun. But, it isn’t a graveyard for people. The “Train Cemetery” is an area of the salt-desert near the city of Uyuni, that contains over 100-abandoned train cars that have sat there since the 1940s.
Uyuni was founded in 1890, and several railways were built to connect it with Bolivia’s other major cities. This allowed Uyuni to become a railway junction that linked the cities together, and it soon became an important transport hub in Bolivia’s mining industry, as trains carrying tin often passed through it on the way to their final destination. Uyuni wanted to establish an even bigger rail network in the early 20th Century, so they imported lots of new trains from Britain. However, the mining industry went downhill in the second half of the 1940s. So the trains were no longer needed, and the demoralized citizens of Uyuni dumped them in the desert, where they’ve rested ever since.Normally, the lack of humidity in dry desert-air would stop metal from rusting so badly. But the Salar de Uyuni is actually the world’s largest salt-flat, which means it’s the remnants of a saltwater lake that evaporated 40,000 years ago.
All the salt was left behind, so whenever the wind blows, it covers the Train Cemetery, which eats away at the metal and speeds up the rusting process. Somebody needs to put those poor locomotive-corpses in coffins!
Arecibo Observatory
Puerto Rico is a beautiful island paradise but if you venture out into the tropical forests around the city of Arecibo, you’ll find one giant blemish lying amongst the trees. This concrete dish isn’t King Kong’s dinner plate, and it’s actually all that remains of an incredibly high-tech space telescope at the abandoned Arecibo Observatory.
The U.S. National Science Foundation built the observatory in 1963, and they used it to examine asteroids, stars and planets for over 50-years. It was the largest telescope of its kind on Earth, but in 2017, it was damaged by the Category-5 Hurricane Maria.
The NSF made repairs and continued to work at the observatory, but the hurricane had weakened it, and in August 2020, a cable holding up the telescope’s central platform unexpectedly snapped and knocked a hole in the dish. The NSF then spent months trying to repair it, but on December 1st disaster struck, when the remaining cables broke and sent the entire platform crashing to the ground.
Watch the Arecibo Observatory's catastrophic collapse! by CNET Highlights The damage was so catastrophic that the Foundation couldn’t repair the observatory, meaning the telescope had transmitted for the last time. They’ve considered building an educational center on the site. But for now, the rubble of this record-breaking observatory is still lying there, and it’s pretty ambitious of Google Maps to
list the site as “temporarily closed”!
MS World Discoverer Wreckage
When you travel on a cruise ship, you expect to receive a relaxing tour around some of the world’s most beautiful locations. However, in April 2000, the passengers aboard the MS World Discoverer were treated to a pretty stressful experience that ended with them fleeing a shipwreck.
As the Discover attempted to sail through the Sandfly Passage in the Solomon Islands, it hit an uncharted coral reef which caused the ship to slowly topple over. The Captain sent out a distress signal, and a nearby ferry evacuated the passengers. But, he knew the ship was going down, so he intentionally beached it in Roderick Bay to make the salvage operation easier. Unfortunately, salvage companies were unable to get there because the Solomon Islands was embroiled in a civil war. So the ship lay abandoned until 2004, when its owner Society Expeditions went bankrupt.
Since then, nobody has technically owned the abandoned ship so it hasn’t been recovered. But incredibly, the shipwreck has become
a tourist attraction, and holiday bungalows have been built right next-door, allowing you to stay a stone’s throw from the Discoverer!
As picturesque as this wreck is, some people are concerned that as the ship continues to degrade its engine will start to leak oil into Roderick Bay. Back in 2015, a cruise ship called ‘The Ocean Dream’ was docked in Laem Chabang, Thailand when it sprung a leak and tilted onto its side. The Shanghai Eastime Ship Management company didn’t want to pay to salvage their boat, so they abandoned it. But a year later, the vessel started leaking oil and created a slick that was thousands of feet long, forcing the owners to clean up their mess to prevent a full-blown environmental disaster. So although the Discoverer hasn’t started leaking oil yet, maybe the ship will meet a similar fate, and the waters in Roderick Bay may not stay crystal-clear for much longer!
Sunken Felicity Ace Cargo Carrier
If you own an expensive boat or car, the absolute worst-case-scenario is getting into an accident that causes it to go up in flames. But in February 2022, the Japanese shipping company MOL suffered an even bigger loss, when a single accident destroyed over 4000 vehicles in one fell swoop.
Their cargo ship Felicity Ace was transporting around 4,000 cars from Germany to the US, but as it passed the Azores archipelago the
ship caught fire, and the flames rapidly spread through its hull. Some experts believe it was started by a faulty lithium-battery in an electric car, and after the crew were evacuated the boat burned uncontrollably for around a week before the fire was finally extinguished.
A salvage company then spent another week figuring out how to safely move a boat of its size. But they needn’t have bothered, because on March 1st, the heavily-damaged ship unexpectedly capsized and sank to the ocean floor, taking its precious cargo with it.
The cars onboard included 20 Lamborghini Huracans, 190 Bentleys and 1,117 Porsches, and in total, the vehicles were worth $438-million. Furthermore, the cargo ship itself was worth 24.5-million so the incident was a pretty big loss for MOL. But on the bright-side, the company is worth $12.2-billion so they’ll definitely recover, and the Felicity Ace’s abandoned cargo is still resting on the ocean floor. So all the fish in the area received a shipment of some brand-new cars to drive around in! Well, as soon as they figure out how to work the pedals!
Aircraft Boneyard
When rich people grow old and retire, they generally move to Florida. But when a multi-million dollar military-aircraft reaches the end of its life, it joins an exclusive retirement community in Tucson, Arizona. Established in 1946, the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base or “Boneyard” houses over 4000 abandoned airplanes, worth a combined $34 billion!
Its residents include hundreds of fighter jets like the 1964 F111 Aardvark and the 1958 F-4 Phantom II. But, some of its VIP guests aren’t left out in the open, like the world’s first stealth-fighter; the F-117 “Nighthawk.” This plane was debuted in 1981, but some of its stealth technology is still top-secret. So, when it was retired from service in 2008, several models were locked away in Davis-Monthan’s warehouses, far from the public eye. Some of the boneyard’s planes have been abandoned for decades, but it barely rains in Arizona, and the low humidity prevents the vehicles from rusting. This lets the Air-Force take parts from the perfectly preserved planes to re-use them, and on one occasion, they brought a long-abandoned aircraft back into service. “Wise Guy” is a B-52 Stratofortress bomber that was built in 1955 and flew in the Vietnam War. It was retired to the Boneyard in 2008, but incredibly, the old-man was called back into service in 2019, to replace another B-52 that was accidentally destroyed during a training exercise!
Wise Guy was in great shape due to the conditions at Davis-Monthan, and although the plane hasn’t been used in battle, it’s currently on stand-by; ready to join the fight over 70-years after it was built!
Duga Radar
If you want to find some sweet abandoned technology, it makes sense to head to one of the most famously abandoned places on Earth.
Chernobyl’s nuclear power plant exploded in April 1986, releasing huge amounts of radiation and creating a 1,000 square-mile exclusion-zone around the plant that’s been abandoned ever since. The area still contains pockets of deadly radiation, and it’s illegal to go there without a guide. But brave explorers regularly sneak in to visit an unbelievable piece of abandoned technology called “Duga”.
This huge metal wall is a gigantic radar station that was built by the Soviet Union in 1972. It stands 492ft high and 2300ft long, which is taller than the Great Pyramid in Egypt and almost as long as Dubai’s Burj Khalifa! It was built while the USSR was involved in the Cold War against the USA, as an early-warning system against incoming missiles. The radar could detect missiles up to 1,600-miles away, so it required a huge amount of energy to run, and conspiracy theorists have speculated that one of the main reasons the Chernobyl plant was built in 1977 was to provide it with more power.Other conspiracy theories surround the station, and when Duga was activated in 1976, it was so powerful that radio operators worldwide could hear the repetitive pulsing noise its signals made. So, people in the West called it the “Russian Woodpecker”, and theorized that it was an experimental Soviet mind control device!
Unfortunately, the missile-detecting radar was abandoned when the Chernobyl plant exploded, and it’s fallen into decay in the years since. So, even if the station really was a secret mind-control machine, it doesn’t work anymore.
SVL Soviet Turbo Jet Train
Before the Soviet Union fell in 1991, they developed lots of experimental projects that were too complicated, expensive or downright insane to work. So, the woods, hangars and scrapyards in modern-day Russia are full of incredible half-finished inventions, like the High-Speed Laboratory Railcar, or SVL.
In 1966, the USA began testing an experimental, jet-powered train called the
M497 Black Beetle, that could reach speeds of 183mph.
The Soviets wanted to keep pace, so in 1970, they took a carriage from a regular ER22 train and bolted two Yak-40 jet engines to the roof! The result was the SVL, and the Franken-train successfully achieved speeds of 124mph! The fact the SVL didn’t immediately explode was impressive, but there were some serious problems with its design.
Firstly, jet engines are deafeningly loud, so it couldn’t be used in residential areas. Furthermore, jet fuel is very expensive, so it would be impossible to create a rail network with multiple SVL’s due to the fuel-costs alone! As a result, the Soviet government cancelled the project in 1975, and the only prototype was consigned to a scrapyard in St Petersburg. The vehicle rusted away for decades, while the Soviet Union collapsed around it. However, the SVL didn’t die for good, because in 2008, it was rescued and turned into a monument that currently sits outside the Tver Carriage Works train factory!
The SVL got a fresh lick of paint and a plaque commemorating its story, which is a pretty nice ending for a pretty awesome vehicle; and hopefully it’ll inspire someone else to make a jet train.
Abandoned Supercars
For most of us, the thought of owning a sports-car like a Lamborghini or Bugatti feels like a total pipe-dream. But according to the internet, the ultra-rich frequently abandon their luxury vehicles in the wilderness, allowing anybody to come and take them for free.
Back in 2011, an image was posted of a Lamborghini Diablo rusting away in a goat-field in an undisclosed location. The Diablo was produced from 1990-2001, and these vintage cars are now worth up to $300,000 so this was an amazing find.
However, according to car-enthusiasts on Reddit, the vehicle’s opaque blue windows suggest it’s actually a “kit car”, which is a cheaper-car that’s stripped down to its chassis and covered with a fiberglass shell to make it look like a sports-car. You occasionally have to cut the windows out of a kit-car’s shell yourself, but the owner of this one didn’t bother, proving that the Diablo is likely a fake. But this Lamborghini isn’t the only supercar discovery that’s turned out to be a hoax. In 2022, images started to circulate online that showed a $2.69 million Bugatti Chiron that had been abandoned in the woods. However, it turned out to be a
3D-render by a designer called Fabian Oberhammer, who was imagining what supercars would look like in the post-apocalypse.So despite what the internet says, the world isn’t really full of supercars lying in fields, woods and ditches, ready for you to take. In fact, if you really want to find an abandoned luxury car, you’ll probably have to head to Dubai. Lots of foreign expats move to Dubai and take out loans to buy expensive vehicles. But in the UAE, you can go to jail for defaulting on a loan, so if a driver runs into financial trouble and can’t afford to pay off their car, they’ll often avoid arrest by abandoning the vehicle and fleeing the country. More than 2000-cars are abandoned in the city every year, and they include luxury vehicles like
this $1-million Ferrari Enzo, that ended up rotting in a Police impound lot for years.
But the UAE isn’t the only Middle-Eastern country with abandoned vehicles. The Ferrari F40 below once belonged to Uday Hussein, the son of Iraq’s deceased former dictator Saddam Hussein. Uday met a violent end at the hands of U.S. troops during the Iraq War in 2003, and the car’s been abandoned there since. But, I wouldn’t recommend trying to steal it, because in 2020 Uday’s sister
put out a message on Twitter saying there would be consequences if anyone tried to take it.
Messing with Saddam Hussein’s family seems pretty foolish, and the Dubai PD’s impound lot looks well-guarded. So instead of stealing those abandoned Ferraris let’s try something a bit more achievable. You'd doubt anyone would mind if you stole the old Ford Falcon below in Muckleford South, Australia. But good luck getting it down from that tree! The landowner Eddie Ford put it up there with a crane in 1985 as a publicity stunt to help promote a book he wrote, and it’s been abandoned there ever since.
Car Forest Of The Last Church
Finding a broken-down car in the middle of the desert doesn’t sound particularly unusual. But if you head to Goldfield, Nevada and venture into the Great Basin desert, you’ll soon come across a whole fleet of cars that have been abandoned in a very strange formation.
a "Car Forest"?! | International Car Forest of the Last Church | Wild Nevada by PBS Reno At first glance, this looks like the aftermath of the most epic car chase in history or an automotive rainstorm. But this scene is actually an art installation by Chad Sorg and Mark Rippie called the
International Car Forest of the Last Church. The display was built back in 2011, and it’s made up of over 40-junkyard cars that have been meticulously stacked on top of each other and buried nose-first in the ground. The piece set an incredibly specific World Record for the “most upturned cars in an art piece” and the artists hoped that the forest would act as a blank canvas for visiting graffiti artists. Today, it’s fair to say they achieved their goals, as the forest has become a popular tourist attraction, and each abandoned vehicle is covered in completely unique artwork from artists around the world! Who knew abandoned vehicles could make dreams come true?
Movie Cars
In the comics and movies, the Batmobile is a souped-up tank that the Caped Crusader uses to chase criminals. But it looks like Bruce Wayne has fallen on hard-times, because he’s had to abandon his treasured car! Instead of leaving it in a ditch outside Gotham, it’s been discarded in a parking lot in Dubai’s Al-Quoz district, where it’s sat since 2015.
But Batman isn’t real, and this vehicle is really a drivable prop that was used during the production of
The Dark Knight, that was then shipped to Dubai to promote the movie’s release in 2008. Afterwards, the car was obtained by a private owner, who put it up for sale for $1-million in 2015. But surprisingly, nobody bought it, and the vehicle has sat gathering dust in a parking lot ever since.So, if you get mugged by a criminal in Dubai, the bat-signal won’t help you. But, if you want to figure out who’s robbed you, there are some people who specialize in solving mysteries! It looks like Scoob and the gang are done solving crime, as they’ve abandoned the Mystery Machine beside a warehouse in Blaine, Washington.
The van was discovered rusting away in 2018, and at first nobody was sure where it came from. But some sleuths on Reddit figured out that this Mystery Machine wasn’t used in a Scooby-Doo movie, and it’s actually from the 2001 movie
Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back. The movie features a R-rated parody of the meddling kids who drive around in this rusty old van, and sometime after the film wrapped, the vehicle was abandoned in Blaine. Storing cars can be expensive, so Hollywood studios will often just abandon the vehicles they use in a movie once they’re finished filming. That’s why the iconic van was left in Washington, and in Coober Pedy, Australia, you can find a straight-up
spaceship rusting away in an ordinary parking lot. The vehicle is a remnant from the Vin Diesel movie
Pitch Black, that was filmed in the area in 2000. In the movie, the spaceship crashes onto an alien planet, before being abandoned by Vin’s character. And in this case, art imitates reality, because when the movie wrapped filming, the prop was left in Australia, and now that ship is a permanent fixture on Earth!
If you were amazed at these unusual abandoned technology and vehicles, you might want to read about the
world's biggest junkyards. Thanks for reading!
