As far as automotive time capsules go, this German dealership must rank as a great discovery.
It came to light recently when a British YouTube channel called Auto Retro stumbled on some pictures of an abandoned Ford dealership in Germany, but since the images dated back to 2010 there was no way of knowing if the vehicles were still there.
After considerable investigative work, the team finally found the building on Google Earth and then travelled nearly 1,600km to film it.
Arriving at the German showroom they discovered a literal treasure trove of “brand new” Fords from the mid 1980s, including lower-spec Sierra hatchbacks, a Fiesta S, Escort and Orion.
The Orion was an Escort-based sedan never offered in South Africa, seen here as a 1.6-litre diesel model. It sports a recent facelift that was also applied to European Escorts as well as South Africa’s Bantam and Mazda Rustler models.
While the Sierras look familiar, albeit differently specced and lacking passenger side mirrors, the Fiesta is an earlier generation model never seen in South Africa.
Granted it would have been somewhat more exciting if they’d found a building in SA with Cortina XR6s and Escort 1600 Sports, but the German time capsule is fascinating nonetheless.
Lacking access to the facility the Auto Retro crew filmed the cars through the showroom window, and although the cars were quite dusty there was plenty of evidence of them being brand new, including labels on the under carriages and plastic covers on the seats of the Escort.
Following the release of the video on YouTube, which had attracted over 800,000 views at the time of writing, the team uncovered some more information on the abandoned dealership.
The cars had apparently belonged to a much larger dealership in Germany, but somehow went unsold even into the 1990s. But when the owner died, his widow moved these unsold cars into the smaller facility that we see today.
This was done to honour her late husband, and as a result the facility and the cars within it were cleaned and maintained over the years. However in more recent times the widow moved into a care facility and as a result the car showroom has been left untouched and somewhat neglected.