Ever wonder what happened to a car you owned after it left your possession? If you sold it intact, it’s probably still out there. If it was wrecked, well, those cars have a variety of fates. Ending up halfway across the globe was the last thing one former Audi Q5 Owner expected. But a forgotten AirTag told him his vehicle, months after being wrecked in a snowy accident, ended up in Poland, of all places.
The car’s owner, Ian, who requested to go only by his first name for privacy, was driving home from work last year in December in eastern Pennsylvania when his car hit a patch of black ice and slid into a guide wire for a telephone pole. He was OK, but his top-trim 2018 Audi Q5 was not. It wrapped itself around the wire, causing enough damage for the vehicle to be written off completely. Ian knows it was sent to Scranton Copart, an auto salvage lot in Duryea, Pennsylvania, shortly after the crash. From there, though, he’s not quite sure what happened.
“I did not track it along the way,” Ian told us, “I just discovered it a few days ago when I went to ping the AirTag in my wallet and remembered I had left an AirTag in my Audi.” That’s when he got the surprise. The forgotten tag was now pinging from Cielcza, a small town in central Poland.
Ian knows nothing about the car’s journey but assumes it was sent to Port Newark in New Jersey before being shipped abroad. In other words, it took around five months for him to discover the car was in Europe, but he doesn’t know how long it took to get there.
Since he discovered it in Poland, Ian says the vehicle has not moved as far as he can tell. “I don’t think it’s fixed up quite yet,” he told The Drive. When it is fixed, though, he hopes to spot it in the Facebook group he first posted his discovery in, Foreign Market Car Sightings, Assuming it’s not just being parted out.
When it’s up and running, he says he’ll disable the AirTag for the owner’s privacy. He liked his Q5, but he didn’t like it that much. “I hope someday to see it in that group driving around, living its very best life again!”
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