Well, the post says the owner of the land has been there since 1970 and had no idea the car was there. So it must have been done in the 60s, at which point the 356 was "just another old car". No different than all of the solid-if worn out-Mercedes, Cadillacs, Chryslers, Pontiacs, BMWs, Porsches, Jaguars, Buicks, etc. etc. that were sent to the crusher in the same time period.

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This is a Porsche 356 Coupe... not just any old beetle.

Even if Porsche wasn't then what it now is, it hardly seems "disposeable". They were somewhat rare, even then.

The car was obviously whole when it went in, how bad could it have been? Merely not running?

I still don't understand, "hey, man, let's just push this into the pond, for the hell of it..." It was probably worth a pretty penny just as a chassis before it went under the water.

Just another car... Porsche has never been "just another car", not even then.

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Not to you, not to me, but to a lot of people, sadly, yes, both now and then. Perfect example (since the shop I work for doesn't work on Porsches, I can't comment directly on them) is a few (not the majority, by any means) of our customers with M BMWs and AMG Mercedes and 12 cylinder Mercedes and BMWs that run them into the ground. They refuse to fix anything on them other than what it takes to keep the car running (not running well, just running), and they ultimately destroy what would otherwise be a perfectly nice car.

Why? Because it's just another car to them, and they don't care. It doesn't matter that there were only a few thousand of them made, that it's a beautiful piece of engineering... Some people simply don't care. It's unfortunate, and I wish it weren't true, but I see it every day. And people like that were around in the 60s as well, and one (or a few) of them apparently pushed an innocent, unsuspecting 356 into a lake.

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I don't doubt you.

But that is very sad, and I have no common frame of reference for that mentality...

But that said, I can't say that I am completely disconnected, I see similar treatment of other technical devices every day, as well.

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I agree; it is extremely sad. Particularly if you stop to consider that a good car-be it a Mercedes 300SL, a Porsche 911 Turbo, a BMW M6, a '63 Corvette, a Facel Vega, a Citroen SM, a Jaguar MkII, or even a more mundane car that is exceptionally good at what it does, say the Legacy GT is a piece of highly complex industrial art. Functional art, yes, and not necessarily art in the traditional sense of say, DaVinci's David or Edvard Munch's 'Scream', but art nevertheless. What else do you call something with thousands of pieces that have to fit together with some degree of precision, that is capable of achieving the longevity and performance that even the first cars did; if fine watches qualify as art (and many would say they do, myself included), fine cars sure as hell do.

But I digress. What I was getting at is that to me, cars like this should not be destroyed. Ever. Customizing is all right (as long as at least a few unmolested examples remain), but to destroy a beautiful automobile-especially a rare one-through neglect, carelessness, malice, spite, or any of the other multitudinous (yes, it's a word, look it up if you desire) reasons that drive people to run their S600 into the ground or dump a 356 into a lake... To destroy a beautiful car like that is almost criminal, in my opinion. And don't get me started on parking them all in Museums, that's almost as bad... They may be art, but they're not the Mona Lisa; they're supposed to DRIVE. But that's a whole new discussion.

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Amen.

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"It's still good Bart!" LOL. That one was a classic.

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