A Crushing Issue: How to Destroy Brand-New Cars

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Reply to
Fat-Dumb and Happy
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It's sad that so much value is simply flushed away. Stuff like glass that does not care about this. The wheels could be captured and sent back to the assembly line. I get that the entire car might be toast, but something can surely be salvaged from cars that appear to not to have gotten wet by more than the fog and low clouds.

Reply to
Jeff Strickland

Perhaps the insurance payout was the path of least resistance. An immediate bankable settlement, as opposed to further outflow of expenses and a protracted period yielding unknown results.

Sure the vehicles could have been stripped for recyclable parts, but that would have taken more time and money to accomplish. And to simply sell recovered parts at fire sale prices would not have been in the best interest for Ford. Better to take the money and run.

Reply to
homepc

Even with the insurance rules, they (the car maker) could say, the tires and wheels and glass can be used again without compromising the integrity of the company, and then assign value that the insurance company then deducts from the settlement.

It just seems to me that there are resource-depletion issues here that could be mitigated and still keep the cars out of the marketplace.

The whole point is that the cars cannot be stripped for very many of the parts -- all of the parts were recycled, that's what happens when they are crushed -- to be sold because most of them contain electronics that are now unreliable. There are lots of parts though that have no moving components, and no electronics, that could be captured and cycled into the inventory to be used on another new car and not compromise the integrity of that car.

I'm not saying anybody did anything wrong, I'm just saying that it's sad that there is nothing to be captured so it can return to inventory. I completely understand the process and the reasoning behind what happened here. If I spent 50-ish years building a reputation as a maker of low-cost quality automobiles, I would not want these cars on the street creating headaches for me or my customers for years to come. I get all of that. But, glass, wheels, door panels, and some other components that are not affected by sitting on a boat for a few extra weeks are all items that could have been spared the crusher.

Part of the problem for Mazda is/was, how to recover any salvagable part(s) and prevent other parts from making it to the black market, thereby tainting Mazda's reputation.

Reply to
Jeff Strickland

The reality is the electronics is (are?) toast. Corrosion permeates the various electronics and will (not might) eventually destroy the chips.

This has long (decades) been known by the various electronics manufactures and the SOP is destruction/recycling of the product as the only viable option.

Reply to
NotMe

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