For some reason, I found this story really interesting, so I'm posting about it.

A couple years ago, a ship carrying all these Mazdas almost sinks. It floats around for a while listing at a severe angle before being righted. The cars are strapped down and undamaged, but Mazda doesn't know if any corrosives made there way into places they shouldn't since the cars sat at a weird angle for so long. After receiving offers from movie makers, school auto shops, and buyers just looking for a deal, Mazda decides to just crush them all for potential liability reasons down the road if something was wrong with the cars.

Link to story

Perfectly understandable with all the "Ambulance Chasers" out there.

I'm sure they took some sort of write-down/off for them.

Yeah, the article said there was an insurance settlement, probably from the shipper. They had to blow all the airbags, cut up the wheels, and keep the process under armed guard so there couldn't be any monkey business with bad parts, or whole cars getting out.

Some story! Those cars would have been standing on one end or the other. Good choice destroying them tho there would have been salvagable parts. Too much bother.

I have a feeling this type of thing happens more often than manufacturers admit... BMW NA had to cancel a bunch of orders on new M3s and 1-series' back in January when this happened in NJ.

http://www.e90post.com/forums/showpost.php...amp;postcount=2

The kicker with this Mazda story is that very few had visible damage, so an automaker could have sold these things to unsuspecting customers.

Well, contrary to popular belief, Big Corporations are not ALWAYS out to screw the little guy.

Not always, just most of the time.