Featured The Toyota USA Museum is crushing a classic Cressida and record-setting Prius

If Toyota really was dumb enough to send these to a wrecker and pictures have surfaced of them there, you can rest assured that the wrecker has some fine print in their contract that will allow them to clean these up and auction them. They're worth a fortune! And will be worth way, way more in coming decades, which is why pictures of them "leaked" online.

 

Sounds similar to when GM stupidly sent nearly all of their leased EV1's to the crusher



Oh well, the bright side is Toyota hasn't met the high bar that GM once set back in the late 1990s .... "Marketing PR: How to Step on your Own Crank"
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So.... what got their spots at the museum?

Seems like lots of noise over the loss of two old cars, so I was looking for the bright side.

 

Give a s...

Two old cars of no great significance especially to sales of current vehicles.

When they ask me to contribute to the museum, maybe I'd want a say but even then I don't give a darn what vehicles they display. It is their marketing budget.

 

Anyone visit the Digital Equipment Computer Museum?

Bob Wilson

 

I saw one of its iterations in Boston before it closed down. I understand that some of their collection later went to the Computer History Museum in California.

 

Thanks for the warning: card decks, screaming line printers, JCL, and TSO. My blood pressure is rising.

Bob Wilson

 

Here's one of my favorite museums. Call it the GM conspiracy museum. They actually lost in court over the crushing of perfectly good trolley cars nearly a century ago. No trolleys means you have to buy lots of tires and lots of cars. Got to love the Evil Genius factor.

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I wonder what EVs would look like today if General Motors had chosen to continue improving the EV-1 instead of repossessing and crushing the lot.

 

Many of the EV1 components including the battery T-tunnel went into the Chevy Volt

The Honda Insight is the spiritual Twin to the EV1 using a lot of the design queues and the aluminum body

 

I would bet Tesla would have never gotten off the ground.
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Didn't Tesla start because of what happened to the EV1 and others?

 

I doubt they are worth that much otherwise toyota would go through the trouble of selling them.

Toyota Will Crush Land Speed Record-Setting Prius From Its Museum: Report

Although it created a new category for land speed record (hybrid) it was modified and likely not street legal. I'm sure if you or I owned that 20 year old prius we would sell it, but its probably more trouble than its worth for toyota. Certainly people are keeping the street legal factory versions of those first gen II prii. The current prius with just modifying the final drive ratio, changing software, and changing tires would soundly beat it. I believe the Hyundai ioniq hybrid beat it by 25 mph in 2016, of course that was modified too. The faster unmodified sports car hybrids are much faster than that but they don't even want to go for land speed record.

On the cressida I'm sure someone would buy it, but the speculation in the drive piece is that toyota would rather sell replica parts than that 46 year old car, and who knows what work would be needed to get it to run properly after sitting for all these years. Not really sad that is dying.

 

It is noteworthy that the 20km famous German Nurburgring track records are often held by hybrids, in the 5 & six minute run times ... the 214mph 918 even being street legal.
Prius? It did it in 20 minutes & 59 seconds

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Here is a video tour of the Toyota Automotive Museaum in Japan - we were fortunate to spend one day there when in Japan- beautiful place, the cars and the museum are simply stated immaculate - would defy someone to find a spec of dirt there- the cars shown are just a small portion of what is in there.

Bing Videos

There are a number of Toyota Museums in Japan - another is a museum of Toyota's Industrial Branch of Businesses that is just as fascinating and impressive to tour

 

Museums don't sell stuff to the highest bidder, they aren't an auction house business, they just move stuff they don't have room for elsewhere. The fact that these photos leaked and there's a claim they'll be crushed makes me think there's way more to this story than what's presented. The value of mint condition classic Japanese collector's cars are well established. The value of these cars to a collector is as much as house! The Most Expensive Japanese Classics Sold at Auctions