In January 2012 a man towed a 2001 Volvo S80 onto a spit of land in a lake he owns, then dug the spit away behind it. It has been sitting there ever since.

The lake is a flooded strip mine near Ottawa, Illinois, in Rutland Township, with about forty feet of standing water in it. Scott Mann owns the water, the island and two local repair shops, which is the fact that makes the rest of it legal rather than mysterious. He put the car out on what was then a peninsula and excavated the connection, leaving a rock platform with exactly enough surface for one sedan and no margin.

The plan was a contest: guess how it got there. He dropped it before it ran, on the reasoning that a prize for the right answer is also an invitation to swim forty feet of cold water for a closer look. So the joke was abandoned at the exact moment it became permanent — no announcement, no reveal, no explanation on site. The car simply stayed, and the absence of the contest is what turned a stunt into a landmark.

It has been on Google Street View since 2015, which did the promotion the contest never got to. The site now carries a 4.9-star rating across more than 250 Google reviews, a sentence that should not be possible about a parked car. The Volvo is reported to be still relatively intact after fourteen winters, and nobody has announced any intention of retrieving it.

Atlas Obscura’s contributor adds the details the photograph confirms and the reference sources do not mention: barbed wire along the bank, more oddly-placed vehicles accumulating in the area, and a second Volvo estate settled into the shallows with VOLVO ISLAND OR BUST painted across the rear glass. Whoever wrote that had understood the assignment.

Go and look from the gate or the roadside — it is private land and the water is deep, which is the whole reason the contest died. There is nothing to do there but see it, which the 250 reviewers appear to have found entirely sufficient.