Way back in the early 1980s, my Dad started making big money–we’re talking a new Toyota Celica, plus enough disposable income for a “fun car.” The first fun car was an MG Midget that barely contained all the parts it needed to run, so there were no previous-owner surprises in its glove compartment or trunk–er, boot. After getting the MG into tip-top shape and selling it, Dad procured fun car number two: a very nice 1977 Datsun 280Z. And here it is, complete with Dad, plus the MG:
The Z arrived much better sorted than the MG had, and only needed a few non-essentials repaired. It also arrived with a few extras in the spare-tire compartment: a twee little pipe that appeared to kid-me like something that might be used by a Leprechaun (this was incorrect, it turns out); a moldering Playboy of which I only saw the cover; and single 10mm wrench, which I still have (the wrench, not the Playboy or pipe).
Other used cars came and went as my sister and I grew into driving age, but the surprises within were few and far between. (Unless expected things like spent cans of starter fluid and dry-gas empties count, which they do not). I did score a very nice Trapjaw action figure (lackey of Skeletor, enemy of He-Man) that was jammed under under the rear seatback of a Dodge Omni, and my sister bought a Corolla with a nice hand mirror and a sandwich-bagged five-dollar stashed in the glovebox. What a win!
How about you? What have you discovered tucked into cars you’ve owned yourself, or in friends’ rides (you little snooper you), or in heaps at the pick-n’-pull? Tell us all about it!
The 1987? shell we briefly thought about swapping Porschelump 1.0’s working bits into had exactly what you’d expect: crusty (but thankfully still wrapped) condoms from 1990-whatever under the seat.
The 411 still had a little booklet with its maintenance records through ~100,000 miles or so in the door. Still! It was a beloved little car for many, many years that got regular maintenance from the VW dealers around the Bay Area. I got it from another Lemons team, so I guess it must’ve raced with this still in the door pocket.
I was the 2nd owner of a 1970 Ranchero, that had an uncommon for the time, a Topper.
Found a box of Condoms wedged under the dash by the Radio.
That was a good spot for that Shagin’ Wagon
I bought a 1981 Datsun 200SX for $500 (still the best $500 I’ve ever spent) and as you would expect for a $500 car it was missing a few features. One of those missing features was the driver side sun visor which was MIA. I grumbled about this for a day or two before I had to slam on the brakes on day (probably because I was blinded by the sun) and a pair of giant, gaudy, faux-gold-plated, Elvis-style sunglasses slid out from under the driver seat. I put those bad boys on and instant relief from the missing sun visor, which was good because at the time I was driving and hour East on I-10 in the mornings and an hour West in the evenings, sun in my eyes both ways.
I looked awesome as hell, but between those glasses, my longer-than-regulation-length hair, and some nonsense about I-10 being a “drug corridor” I got pulled over all the damn time in that Datsun.
I blame the glasses.
January of 2023 was the start of my second year of ownership of a 2018 Alfa Giulia Q4 Ti. Figured it was time to clean out the glove box. I pulled the manual cover out and heard what sounded like velcro separating. I looked in the glove box and saw nothing. Then I looked up at the top interior of the glove box and saw two Trojan Condom wrappers stuck up there. Luckily they were unused, but the wrappers had adhered to the top of the glove box. This also explained why there were five women’s phones paired to the car’s infotainment system when I got it.
Having to post a second time cause I totally forgot about this. After I got my Lancia from a local dealer auction I was cleaning behind the passenger seat and found paperwork tucked halfway under. It was a printout of the estimated value of the car 2 years before I bought it. Valued at $9-12k in 2018. The selling wholesaler cut her loose for $3k and I had been willing to go up to $5k, fully knowing that was a low-ball offer. If he had bothered to clean the car out he would be several thousand dollars richer.
Years ago ( late 90s) I worked at a Nissan dealership, old lady bright her late 80s Sentra in complaining of a knocking noise in her driver’s door
Took off her panel and found a Japanese coke bottle rolling around inside….must have been Friday afternoon on the assembly line..
A bearskin rug complete with snarling skull and claws in the backseat of a 1960 Sedan de Ville. It was there when the owner accepted my offer to buy the car, but she had removed it by the time I took possession of the vehicle. I should have demanded it be returned.
This was in Gothenburg, Nebraska. The owner was the daughter of a vice-president of Coors Beer and I understand the car had belonged to him.
Best highway vehicle I have ever ridden in. Better than new luxury cars. Just better.
Well, I left a little pill bottle of cremains in my last 80s Subaru when I sold it. Some may think it creepy, but my former gf & I used to explore fire and Forrest Service roads in my Roos, so I chucked some of her ashes in the glove compartment and would scatter a pinch whenever I found a place she would’ve liked. What’s worse is that I sold the car to her older sister. I did get them back a few years later when she had me work on it. I never told her they were in there, though.
I carry them in my current Subaru still. Kind of traditional by now. Every once in a long while I swear I can feel her squeezing my right thigh a bit-her signal for, “Go faster!” (while driving, y’all. Sheesh!)
Maybe it’s a messed-up way of dealing with loss, but it doesn’t harm anyone-and I know she would’ve appreciated the thought.
I find that quite honorable.
A 1911 under the floor mat of an Buick Century. I was working at a car wash at the time and the 80 year old lady forgot that it was there. The supervisor put it in between some towels and brought it to her.
A trunk full of rifles in a dealer loaner. Yes they called. The previous loanee wanted those back 🙂
Not actually weird but it was obvious that the last owner of my truck was a high school girl because there was a Pina Colada air freshener on the mirror and hair ties and pens under the seat.
While cleaning out the back seat of our son’s college car I found a .38 Special dummy round and 9mm casing, to go with the slightly rusty 7.62x54R in the trunk. Surprising to others but not me.
I just remembered a fun one, a,college friend bought a 73 Galaxie 500 at yard sale and found our PE instructor’s unemployment card in the glove compartment
Dad owned a repo lot during my high school years, and I worked as the lot attendant for much of that time. By law we were supposed to bag up and document everything in the cars in case the lessor came to get their stuff or the car. So we saw a lot of wacky stuff. This was from about ’83 to ’95. What I can remember:
Whoops, sorry. Replace “Lessor” in the above comment with “Lessee”
What’s fascinating about these posts (and your list esp.) is that every manner of vice/danger shows up except booze. I wonder if 60-70 years ago, the number one find would have been liquor bottles.
Oh, there was all kinds of liquor, beer, and other alcohol in these cars. Usually they were empty. I just didn’t qualify that as “weird”.
While cleaning out the gas tank on my GT6, I discovered that the object rattling and rolling around in there was none other than a Fisher-Price Little People cowboy figurine from the late 80s.
https://i.ibb.co/qyf3V85/IMG-20211224-114115809.jpg
I’m assuming you still have that-prominently displayed, too. I know I’d show it off
In my garage, yes. I’d like to make it into an antenna topper someday.
Well, howdy pardner.
In a AMC Rambler station wagon: A Fossilized Shoestring French Fry that was as hard as a rock.
And being a hungry wee lad that I was at the time, you know that I just had to have a taste of it. (☉̃ₒ☉)
(I do not recommend eating fossilized foods) _:(´ཀ`」∠):_
I pried a fossilized chicken nugget out of the seat track on my Roadmaster. One of my kids dropped it months (years?) previously.
It was a Friday night, and I recall thinking as I was doing it “I used to be cool. Girls would call ME asking me out!”
Well all of those girls that used to call you are now Mothers themselves and are uncool as well 🙂
My father bought a BMW and found this weird stalk sticking out from the steering column. Still not sure what it does.
COTD!
Once picked up ‘74 Cadillac Sedan deVille that had been sitting in a barn in New Jersey for decades. In the trunk, stuffed way back near the rear seat back was large plastic wrapped parcel. Upon unrolling it, I discovered the desiccated corpse of a male later identified as Jimmy Hoffa. The police said…. nah, don’t want to bore everyone, you probably all saw the documentary, anyway.
[Deleted]
Cars I’ve bought? Random pills and clip on sunglasses.
I also briefly worked at an auto auction and the stuff found in the used cars was all over the map. Loads of CDs, lots of change, an oddly high number of Hindu religious figurines, crack pipes, fancy cigarette cases. One guy found $200 in the glove box of one.
A fully loaded handgun clip in the black hole between the seat and the center console.
Also, long before that… lots and lots of rose petals. Apparently, the station wagon was previously the flower car in funeral processions.
My elderly aunt bought a Mercury Topaz in the mid-90s – the official car of elderly aunts in the mid-90s – and I found a pack of very nice royal blue playing cards.
“That’s not that weird” you might say.
But the LOCATION was weird. They were behind an air vent, which I had to take out to get the playing cards. Why and how was it there?
Serious note here for all you parents purchasing vehicles for your high school age students: the number of times random rounds of ammo are found in used vehicles should lead you to scour the interior of your newly purchased car. These days most schools have the absolute right to search a car with no warrant or probable cause and if they find some loose ammo in the car your student could be looking at suspension or expulsion. Even if your kid borrows your car for a day and you accidentally or on purpose leave ammo in the car the same problem can apply.
The same could happen with random drugs or paraphernalia.
It’s very different from school in my day when pickups with a gun in the window rack were no big deal and we all carried pocketknives.
America is truly a normal country.
Over here in the gun-fearing UK I bought a moody BMW 3-Series with half a dozen loose shotgun cartridges in the boot (trunk) and a blood-stained boot (trunk) carpet. I’m not sure how much trouble you can get in over here for having shotgun cartridges without a licence, but I bet it’s probably worse trouble when mixed with bloodstained carpet.
I assumed it was rabbit or pheasant blood, and a previous owner was just a messy hunter. Or murderer. Either way, messy.
It was a parts car, and the troublesome parts went to a scrap yard.
B/c at least two movies, I’m imagining Jason Statham owned it?
At the time I was living 50 miles from his home town, so maybe he’d been doing some method acting.
I also saw rifles and shotguns openly displayed in gun racks in pickup trucks at school – in the student parking lot. Most of my friends and I had our own rifles and/or shotguns the closet at home. We were surrounded by firearms everywhere we went.
No one ever got shot. No one ever so much as suggested shooting up the school. It was a foreign concept.
Perhaps “it’s the guns” is a touch simplistic.
And yeah, honor students and Eagle Scouts have been not just punished, but even expelled because of things like steak knives absentmindedly left in the car they drove to school. So yeah, search your kids’ cars – not because they might have something they shouldn’t, but because they might have something that will get them in WAY deeper trouble than makes any sense.
So, I bought a 1982 FJ60, brought it home and thought, “Hey, I should clean it up and detail it.” It had a lot of mud and crust from the previous owner enjoying it as it was intended to be. There was pounds of built up dirt and mud plastering the inside of the wheel wells in particular. After hosing them out for about 15 minutes, I resolved to just knock it out with a plastic scraper bar. Eventually, I came upon the front passenger side wheel well, and was using my hands since the hose had already softened the caked on earth and detritus there. I felt something with more tensile strength than the crud and sludge up in there, so I started pulling. It didn’t seem to be a part of the vehicle, so I gave it a few good tugs and it finally let go. In my hands, I held blue and white striped boxer shorts. They filled a hole in the wheel well. I had, in my hands, a stranger’s boxers that were used for a semi-structural repair. Structural. Boxers.
I had previously purchased a 2004 Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo from a fine, local gentleman. He was in the process of cleaning it out and I distinctly recall the number of booster seats he was removing. I didn’t really give it much thought until I cleaned out the interior. In addition to finding $5.46 cents in loose change and one dollar bill, I found something else that the previous owner seemed to have forgotten. One, unopened, ready-to-use prophylactic. And I said to myself, I said, “This gentleman may not have had to sell his Jeep if he had remembered this in the back map pocket.”
A baby shark, preserved in a jar of formaldehyde. In the same car was a rabbit pelt and a broken crossbow, but that’s not nearly as odd.
Once I helped empty an abandoned van that had an electric organ in the back. That sucker was heavy!
Obligatory: DOO DOO DOO-DOO DOO-DOO
Change. Like, almost twenty bucks of quarters, nickels, and dimes. No pennies.
Not THAT strange, but where I found it was odd. It was a ’96 Trans Am WS6 with a six speed. The plastic piece that held the shifter boot had broken, and most of the change was in that space in the console.
Under the seat of an ’83 Datsun pickup, I found a half-full box of .22 rifle ammo, a scuba diver’s C-card, and an unused condom, among other detritus. There was a cassette tape in there too, but I don’t remember what it was.
A while back I went thru the glovebox of the car I inherited from my dad. He always claimed he didn’t go to the casinos much (he lived in Vegas), but I found a whole wallet full of Players Club cards from various casinos in town… Hopefully he doesn’t still have a marker somewhere…
After a year and a half of ownership I found a perfect, whole graham cracker under the middle seat of my highlander. I had bought it from a toyota dealer, and the interior seemed well cleaned, but it would seam they missed it. my son was too young to eat solid food, so I’m pretty sure it wasn’t from him. not really that crazy, but it just struck me as odd.