[KennyBlanken]

Frankly, my takeaway here is that police detectives in Finland are poorly trained and not very good at analytical thinking.

In the first case, if they'd reasoned things out like the author did, they could have simply had someone walk alongside the road that he was likely to be on, they would have seen pretty obvious evidence of damage to the ground / foliage, gone for a closer look, and seen all the broken car bits.

Add to that the author getting the cold shoulder when he called the police and said "hey, can you send a detective over, I found a car in the water and it matches the vehicle in the missing person case nearby", and they basically told him to fuck off - and then finally showed up when the fire brigade pestered them a second time.

[trymas]

Hindsight is 20/20, though I was asking similar things since almost the beginning. If the car went off the road - there must have been signs for it. Broken shrubs, trees, car parts, etc.

Especially for the first case, where OP found Citroen car parts on the side of the road 10 years after the accident.

My only guess - in the middle of forested Finland - police force is small and most likely overworked.

[suddenclarity]

We don't know what was said between the author and the police. As stated in the article, it's a cold case where the search had been going on for years and they had several witnesses claiming to have seen the car in a different location.

Finding a car isn't that uncommon. I know one youtuber doing these kind of things found three cars at the same location when searching for a missing person. In Sweden we have one talked about waterfilled hole with at least 17 cars but no one wants to deal with it due to the costs and environmental issues if you start pulling them.