Does your car exude O2 instead of CO2? Is it more forested than a Subaru Forester? You just might be the owner of one of these 7 amazing overgrown parked cars!
China’s Ultimate Zombie Car
“Yo dawg, I heard you like vines on your van so I left this one parked outside for over a year so you can’t even see what color the paint is!” Xzibit A: the ivy-covered vehicle above, situated since sometime in 2012 (no one really knows when) in an unpaved parking lot in the village of Huayang, Sichuan province. The original owner, when tracked down through the van’s license plates, stated he sold the vehicle three years ago and lost touch with the purchaser, who seems to have lost touch with his purchase.
Such abandoned vehicles have become common enough in China to have earned the sobriquet “Jiangshi Che” (zombie car)… dead to the world but eerily still alive thanks to their continually growing cloak of vegetation.
The ridiculously overgrown van above sparked a number of complaints to local authorities, who were unable to make much headway against thick ivy stems and sharp thorns… maybe they should have brought along one of the local pandas. Eventually it was towed away, vines and all, to meet an unknown fate.
Green Menace 1, Rusty Dodge 0
Certainly nothing like the scene out of some natural Little Shop Of Horrors above couldn’t happen in the good old U S of A, right? Wrong, though a Japanese import (kudzu) can be blamed… and perhaps not coincidentally yet ironically, it’s chosen to engulf an American “import fighter” – possibly a 1980’s vintage Dodge Omni. Credit Flickr member Martin Prochnik with this image of voracious kudzu vines slowly smothering this abandoned vehicle at the astonishingly quick (for a plant) rate of up to one foot per day. One hopes he escaped the clutches of the terrible tendrils in one piece – and with two feet!
Wounded In The Balkans
Long-term parking in Podgorica, Montenegro? It’s more likely than you think, once you’ve finally found a parking space. Some drivers are so fearful of losing their precious spot they simply don’t move from it… for months or more! Luckily for them, the local police (and local stray cats) abide by a strict set of job descriptions and dealing with extremely long term parking isn’t one of them.