There are several places on our planet with a very high concentration of cars, but their manufacturers are not at all proud of them. Moreover, they are increasing, which does not bode well.
Have you ever tried to ask yourself what happens to cars that are built but not sold? In short, those that are produced outside of custom books and orders and then sadly wait at dealers for their potential customers? And if these don’t show up, the model year goes by and new models come in, they are loaded up and taken away one day – where exactly? Why are cars actually produced “for storage” when they then stand in the open air for months and years and deteriorate? Come see it with us. This is one of the biggest shames of all car companies.
Cemeteries of cars, often brand new ones
The existence of “car cemeteries” will be confirmed by any expert dealing with the issue of car production. It is a kind of imaginary black dot on the beautiful and carefree world of new cars, which we see every day in TV commercials of most car companies. Behind this seemingly flawless story, dozens of other stories are actually hidden, the picture of which is no longer so pretty and which the producers really do not want to be published in the prime time on the main channels.
It would not help their painstakingly (and expensively) built image much. What kind of stories are they? We have summarized them for you in the following overview:
The Five Secret Sins of Car Manufacturing:
- significant impact on the environment during the extraction of minerals needed to manufacture cars
- shifting production to cheaper and cheaper destinations
- although cars are increasingly modern products, their “durability” and longevity are decreasing year by year
- the total carbon footprint of automobiles is greater than that reported
- unsold and unrecycled cars fill parking lots around the world and harm the environment
If we were to take these “sinful five” point by point and dedicate a separate article to each one with a detailed description of the given issue, it would take us a week of writing and we would not be done yet. For example, moving production more and more to the east is something that the European user of European cars he doesn’t exactly read twice. In short, Western Europe is already too expensive for the production of some components. However, we will be interested in the last point, dedicated to the “storage” of manufactured and unsold cars.
Why are cars actually made if they end up in the desert?
The question from the headline comes to mind for anyone who thinks a little bit about the seemingly senseless behavior of car companies. To those cars that stand in the thousands and tens of thousands on various surfaces all over the world because technically there is nothing, they are often exactly the same models that you buy for expensive and extorted money in your showroom on the outskirts of town. Many might say to themselves “well, I’ll take some if you let them rot there”. Surprisingly, you won’t take. Not only are the campuses mostly guarded, but registering such a car would be a superhuman task.
So why make something that you almost certainly know won’t sell? There are several reasons. Often, only a component is missing (recently these are most often chips), without which the car does not work, but otherwise everything necessary for its production is there. And it would be significantly more expensive for the car company to stop the entire production, stop receiving materials, components and finally send employees home. Therefore, in such a situation, it is more advantageous to continue manufacturing “in stock”, so to speak, and hope that the chips will actually arrive in the end and it will be possible to install them additionally.
Semiconductor crisis: we are forced to manufacture to stock
After all, we don’t have to go far, this is exactly how Škoda Auto practiced it during the semiconductor crisis, lots of parked Octavias and Superbs could be seen in several places in the Czech Republic. Similarly, for example, VW in America bought diesel TDI versions of its cars as part of the Dieselgate affair and he knew in advance that he would defacto never sell them to anyone again. And in exactly the same way, he used them to fill parking areas around airports, or designated places in deserts, completely outside of civilization, as described in the attached video:
How AutoŽivě.cz sees it
The problem of parked and slowly decaying cars is becoming an unpleasant, if possible uncommunicated and more or less secret reality all over the world. Of course, no one wants to brag that in the 21st century they can’t either technically, financially, or commercially, in short, any advice with modern cars, which in the vast majority of cases are not missing anything and are capable of operation. It’s just simply more “beneficial” not to sell them at all.
Which is really not something that the PR and advertising department of any car company wants to show today, in the era of widening scissors between poverty and wealth. Millions of dollars are lost in those “grounded” cars, which have to be recovered somewhere on the other side. So in all those smiling and positive advertisements, it would have to be written that the price of a new car also includes three others that are decaying somewhere in the desert in California… And that is really nothing to be happy about or to admire.
Not to mention the ecological risks, all those cars slowly, but in the long term, drop “something” under them, even though they are often empty. And if one day similar “storage” i electric cars, no one wants to imagine where it could end up. Let’s hope there is a more dignified end to the life of cars than on “free” lots around the globe. It is not worthy of the progress that the 21st century should be promised.
