Why Certain Cars Like This Exist In An Internet Deadzone

I’ve often seen a younger gentleman rolling around my neighborhood in what is clearly a 2006 Lexus SC 430 Pebble Beach Edition. This surprised me at first, as the car MSRP’d for the equivalent of $109,000 in 2025 dollars. Then I remembered that my luxury car was the 2025 equivalent of about $70,000, and I paid $3,000 for it. I’m not sure what deal this kid got, but I was determined to write about it. That turned out to be harder than I expected.

There’s a specific set of years for which information on cars and, honestly, information in general on the web is hard to come by. It’s a deadzone caused by the maturation of the internet from the past into the internet as we know it.  To use an outdated parlance, this is the transition from the bleepy modems and restrictions of Internet 1.0, to the cable modems and video/image-rich Internet 2.0.

While it isn’t universal, there’s a specific model year period that’s difficult to find good information about and, worse, to find official press photos that aren’t tiny and almost unusable. Depending on the automaker, it’s between MY 2003 and MY 2006, meaning cars revealed between 2002 and 2006.

I have a theory for why this is, mostly because I started to work on the Car Internet back in 2007 and witnessed a lot of it firsthand. The way car photos used to be distributed to journalists was by literally sending out a photo of a car with a caption attached:

This one seems to have been embargoed to September 23rd, 1980, because people must have been clamoring to see what the new Dodge Aries was going to look like. Back in the magazine era, this date let publications like Car And Driver know they couldn’t put the photo in a publication that published before that date. A lot of these photos still exist as almost all of them were scanned in by someone at some point.

When the Car Internet came around, this caused all sorts of trouble. Magazines would often print photos of cars well before the agreed-upon dates, having a lot to do with the fact that magazines can’t really control exactly when they show up at the Rite-Aid in Grand Central. After about 2009, this no longer really mattered, as all photos were released via email link/proto-dropbox, but this caused all sorts of problems for a while.

It’s that interim period where things get a little fuzzy. And I mean that literally. What photos were distributed were often distributed at lower res than we’re used to, owing to the fact that the largest photo you’d see on very old, pre-blog or early-blog websites was about 500 pixels wide. I believe when I started at Jalopnik in 2007, the photos weren’t ever supposed to be larger than 600 pixels wide. So you get a lot of photos from that era, which, at best, are 600 pixels wide:

This is a MY 2006 Suzuki Grand Vitara, and there’s basically no one online around to preserve or support this brand’s photos. It’s possible that, without enough searching, you’ll find something on FavCars or NetCarShow, but even then, I couldn’t find photos of the 2006 Lexus SC 430. Nor were they on the Lexus USA press site or the global Toyota newsroom I often use for photos.

Could I find photos of the 2008 Pebble Beach RX350? Of course! The 2007 SC 430? No problem! By 2007, blogs like Jalopnik and AutoBlog were ascendant, and automakers were making sure to create high-res assets.

Eventually, after much searching, I did find a couple of photos on the Lexus Canada site, which preserved them at a reasonable ~1000kb.

Just look at that sweet Camel Brown interior, matched with the Tiger Eye Mica exterior. This is a gorgeous car and, while press photos aren’t easy to find, there are plenty of classifieds.

This isn’t universal. Japanese automakers, Korean automakers, some German automakers, and General Motors are absolutely the worst at this. Ford has, unfortunately, followed GM in having an influencer-focused newsroom that makes finding photos nearly impossible, but Ford thankfully has the Heritage Vault, which has almost everything you’d ever need, including brochures. Obviously, you can call up most automakers and get photos if you really want them, but it’s not as easy for regular folks.

The best at this? For cars in this deadzone, Stellantis actually has the best archives, including actual video footage. It’s kinda the only “best” thing about Chrysler cars from this era, but I respect it.