I think this might be one of the most arrogant and carbrained things I’ve ever seen. These people launch (working!) cars off of a cliff into what should’ve been a pristine riverbank, complete with leaking oil and fuel and fluids, for…fun? And they cut down over a thousand trees to do it?
What about cleanup? They claim they “meticulously” clean everything up afterwards but…how? How do they retrieve every single piece of debris, every shard of metal and plastic and glass, every single square millimeter of contaminated soil after this?
According to the novel American Gods it’s a discreet way to dispose of the bodies.
No one expects them to be hidden in plain sight inside the klunker in the middle of the ice, no one’s going to risk walking there and possibly drowning, and once it drops no one’s going to dive to the bottom of the lake to find the skeletons in the old klunkers from previous years.
My local police does have a dive team, or at least access to one, but i could see that being harder to do in the past.
The culture may have been different then, but in my area fishermen will often go out before the ice is driveable. The smart ones wear some kind of floatation device. The younger fishermen would probably go check out the car during a slow part of the day, maybe see if some cool stuff is left behind or take some cool photos of it.