5 amazing cars discovered at the bottom of the sea and other underwater graves

Cars and water have a complex relationship. Rain is ok. A light Ford? Sure. A dramatic slow-motion splash through a puddle while someone watches from the sidewalk? Practically a ritual. However, the ocean? A river? Hurricane? This is where things go sideways – or, more often, straight down.

The thing is, cars end up in water more often than you think. Sometimes it’s an accident. Sometimes this is insurance fraud. Whatever the reason, the result is almost always the same: a nice automobile sitting at the bottom of something very wet, slowly becoming an artificial reef and initiating really awkward conversations for the divers.

If it is ever saved, the problems don’t end there – a car may become uninsurable after being issued a flood-branded title, which is exactly what happens when water damage is severe enough to completely destroy the vehicle. Unlike a certain Lotus Esprit, which famously had other ideas, most cars are not designed with submarine functionality in mind.

Automakers spend zero time thinking about hydrodynamics, pressure equations, or barnacle resistance in the design phase. And yet, here we are – with a surprisingly rich history of cars spending the day underwater. These are the five best.

When it comes to halo car brands, few hold as much weight as a Bugatti – and no other Bugatti has literally carried as much weight as the “Lady of the Lake” 1925 Type 22 Brescia (as shown in the picture above), which spent the better part of a century at the bottom of a lake 173 feet below. The story begins in Paris in 1934, where Grand Prix driver René Dreyfus loses the car to Swiss playboy Adalbert Bode in a drunken poker game. Bode took him home, was stopped at the Swiss border, and could not pay the fee.

The car was destroyed when it rolled into Lake Maggiore. It sat there undisturbed until 1967, when scuba diver Ugo Pilon found it resting on its side, beginning four decades of recreational diving on the wreck. Its rescue resulted in tragedy. Both Damiano Tamagni and his father Maurizio were members of the local diving club.

In 2008, Damiano was brutally beaten by three youths in a street attack and died from his injuries. The club, Centro Sport Subaki Salvatagio Ascona, decided to save the Bugatti and auction it off to fund the Fondazione Damiano Tamagni, a charity that addresses teen violence. It was sold at Bonhams for approximately $370,000 to collector Peter Mullin, who placed it on unrestricted display in his California museum.

Mullin died in 2023, and the museum subsequently closed and its remarkable collection of French cars was auctioned off, although the Lady of the Lake Bugatti was not among those for sale. The Bugatti is as much a piece of art as it is an automobile, but its story can be matched by few others. As hemmings Put it this way, “Art is open to interpretation, and art is designed to make you think and feel. Brescia scores on all counts.”

The options were pretty much limitless when researching which cars to include on this list. But if there is one incident that has caused the greatest loss of automotive value in history, the Felicity Ace disaster is the undisputed champion. On February 10, 2022, the Felicity Ace departed from Emden, Germany carrying 3,965 Volkswagen Group cars across the Atlantic.

Six days into the journey the goods train caught fire. The 656-foot ship burned for two weeks before capsizing and sinking on March 1, dropping each car to a depth of 9,800 feet. On board were 15 Lamborghini Aventador LP 780-4 Ultima – the final version of Lamborghini’s flagship supercar, each priced at upwards of $500,000.

When the ship departed production had already ended, making each one irreplaceable. 1,117 Porsches, 189 Bentleys and 1,944 Audis were also lost. Total estimated cargo value: $401 million. The damage was so catastrophic that Lamborghini had no choice but to restart production specifically to replace the 15 sunken units.

The ship is now at 9,800 feet – none of which is ever coming back as rescue efforts at such depths are basically impossible. In addition to the loss of cars, Felicity Ace may prove to be a major pollution threat as 4,000 cars and hundreds of tons of fuel now lie unrestricted at the bottom of the Atlantic.

The Ferrari Mondial is arguably the least desirable Ferrari of all time, so much so that you can buy a 1986 Mondial for $49,750. In the Ferrari Classiche world, that’s peanuts. The Mondial is a four-seat grand tourer that no one asked for. The model spent most of its life being the punchline of Ferrari jokes. However, one particular 1987 Mondial managed to become the most famous Ferrari of its generation by spending 26 years at the bottom of an Amsterdam canal.

The car was stolen in 1987. Dutch police searched for years before closing the investigation in 1994, after which the insurer paid out the original owner and the case was closed. The Mondial is gone, possibly forever. Then in June 2020, Dutch fire brigade divers on a routine training exercise in Amsterdam’s IJ River spotted something large and wedge-shaped on the river bottom.

It was Mondial. The police were called, but could not recover it alone – it ultimately required a joint effort of the fire department and the Dutch Ministry of Defense to pull it to the surface on July 8, 2020. It turned out to be a wreck. Mirror missing, a door missing, hood folded like paper. The insurer declared it a write-off and sent it to the junkyard.

Then the story went viral, and suddenly everyone wanted a part of it. People were offering to buy engine blocks to make coffee tables. It was displayed at the Artis Zoo Aquarium in Amsterdam for approx. Then a Netflix production came calling, planning to feature it in a series about young entrepreneurs of the 1980s. Not bad for Ferrari’s favorite four-seat car.

The title of this article promises watery graves, and a backyard in Los Angeles that used to have a pool absolutely qualifies. This is the story of a Ferrari that never reached the bottom of the ocean – because thieves forgot where they had buried it previously. In October 1974, a plumber named Rosendo Cruz purchased a brand-new Ferrari Dino 246 GTS – one of our readers’ favorite Ferrari designs – from a Hollywood dealership for $22,500 as a birthday gift for his wife.

He drove it for exactly 501 miles. Then, on the evening of their wedding anniversary, it disappeared from outside a restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard. Cruz filed a police report, collected $22,500 from his insurance company, and that was that. Except that wasn’t the case. Cruise had arranged the theft himself, hiring a crew to steal the car and permanently dispose of it – the original plan was to dump it in the Pacific Ocean.

The crew never made it that far. Instead, they buried it in a backyard in West Athens, Los Angeles, wrapped in plastic wrap, blankets and a tarp, stuffing towels into the exhaust pipe to keep out moisture. Then they forgot where they had kept it. In February 1978, two children hit something metal while digging in a yard.

Sheriff’s deputies arrived to find the perfectly preserved Ferrari Dino out of the ground. It was restored, registered, and given the vanity plate “DUG UP” – which it still wears today. As told by current owner Brad Howard self development“For a car that was painted 40 years ago, it’s still in pretty good shape.”

There are 375 McLaren P1s in the world, and none of them are as famous as this one. Unit No. 348 of them spent the bulk of Hurricane Ian floating on a residential street in Florida in 2022, battered by storm surge and debris before coming to rest on a toilet seat where floodwaters decided to abandon it.

The P1 had just arrived at its new owner’s home – a week after delivery, Hurricane Ian made landfall and took it straight out of the garage. A video of the Volcano Yellow hypercar being dragged across the road amid strong waves of water instantly went viral. The car was worth close to $2 million before the flood. It was later listed in a Copart Insurance auction with a starting bid of $575,000.

Including salt water, broken glass, rusty wires, dead hybrid batteries and moldy frunk. YouTuber Tavarish, real name Freddy Hernandez, saw the video and posted on Instagram that he would buy the car if the post got 40,000 likes. Had done this. He paid $575,000 for the $2 million hypercar and got to work.

Reconstruction has since taken a wild turn. Rather than restore it to stock, Tavarish teamed up with Frank Stephenson – the original designer of the P1 – to transform it into the McLaren P1 EVO, aiming for 1,400 horsepower and a top speed of more than 250 mph. The most famous flood car in YouTube history is being reborn as the fastest McLaren ever built.