Here are the images of the “graveyard” of electric vehicles – Observer

From China photos of what will be one of the first “cemeteries” of electric vehicles… In undeveloped places for security reasons thousands of cars side by side and already show the passage of timeas the vehicles in question are believed to be there, completely abandoned, from February.

Photos posted on Reddit remind 2017 drone footage showing Dieselgate strikedepicting hundreds of thousands of Volkswagens losing sight of them in makeshift parking lots in the United States of America as a result redeem… On a radically smaller scale – in the thousands, not hundreds of thousands – an identical scenario is now uncovered, this time with electric vehicles that were part of the fleet of China’s Pand Auto, a transportation platform such as Uber headquartered. in Chongqing, which has been operating in 12 cities of this Asian country since 2015.

Putting more than 20,000 electric vehicles serve 4 million usersUntil recently, Pand Auto was considered a success story. But it went bankrupt, and the death of the company partly explains the “graveyard” where the company’s fleet is located.…

The problems that are now evident in this open-air grave originate in 2018, when Pand Auto decided to team up with another Chinese company, Lifan, which not only produced electric vehicles housed on the platform, but would also try to enable Pand Auto to start. offer your customers self-driving car rides. Authorization for testing came in 2019but experience showed that the technology was (far) out of line with the local competition, and the poor results were not delayed.

At the end of 2020, Lifan’s debts totaled 4 billion US dollars (about 3.4 billion euros), which resulted in the Manjianghong Equity Investment Fund Enterprise taking over most of the capital, which also has a stake in Geely (owner of Volvo and main shareholder company). Daimler / Mercedes). But if the capital investment did not free Lifan from the difficult recovery process prevented Pand Auto from avoiding bankruptcy… In February last year, a Chinese transport platform was unable to pay off its debts.

Customer service ceased and vehicles – some Chery brands, but mostly the LF 330EV (an electric version of the Chinese Mini Cooper clone) – were deposited at the site. In anticipation of a second life, that is, as a buyer, most cars are agonized by the weather, not knowing what the economic and environmental consequences of this situation will be.… It is true that Pand Auto tried to sell cars to pay off part of the debt, but, as it turned out, without much success.

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In addition to combustion-powered Volkswagens parked in giant US car parks, these small electric vehicles from Pand Auto stored on a stretch of land in China come to mind. other cases of accumulation of a large number of used cars in parking lots… One of them happened across the Atlantic when General Motors released its first aerodynamic electric EV1of which just over 1,100 units were produced between 1997 and 1999, almost exclusively for the California market. The batteries used in the first generation, manufactured in 1997, were from Delco, inferior quality and still made with lead acid technology, which caused serious problems, including a certain tendency to catch fire. The batteries would later be swapped out for more efficient ones from Panasonic, but the EV1 itself had design and safety issues that forced GM not to extend the batteries. leasingto return the models, destroy them, and place them in the park where several units have fled.

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Most recently in France another case with electric vehicles, namely small models produced by Bolloré and driven by Autolib., company car sharing who signed a contract with the Paris Council, in force from 2011 to 2018. After a conflict between the parties and several incidents of fire (attributed to vandalism that was never proven), Paris suspended payments and bankrupted Autolib. The functional cars were put into the park, and 2000 in the best condition were repaired and sold to private individuals. Of the rest, several hundred were dismantled for replacement, and the rest were written off.

The small cars produced by Bolloré have even become the subject of controversy after social media accused them of contaminating the land they were stored on for years due to a potential battery leak. These claims will be investigated in fact-checking from Agence France-Pressewhich turned out to be false.