So let’s start with the image above. The car’s been washed off, it looks fine! Are you sure it was in storm surge up to the windshield?
Engine bay doesn’t look bad
Interior seems to have survived
Rear passenger compartment doesn’t seem too bad
But that’s not a good sign. The longer you look, the more unfortunate little things you see
Like all the little rust spots in the chrome
Silt in the trunk
This is where it started to get really scary for me. Sure, painted surfaces are holding up, but that rust isn’t just at the edges of the holes – it’s extending out from between the two pieces of metal, where there are two unpainted surfaces.
I hate this photo. It’s like an MRI of a cancer patient. This is just the glove box – think of what’s going inside the sills and door pillars, which filled up with salt water and are probably still wet. You can see how that happened inside the glove box door, and that bottom corner is already almost gone. This is just one of thousands of cars slowly dying from the inside out.
Collector-car insurance agencies are saying that about 10,000 “special” cars were damaged, which includes collector cars; and high-end late model cars.
photo credit: Phil Parisi via Bob Sekelsky
edited text credit: David Adolphus via 2012 hemmings.com
