Posted on 03/29/2018 10:18:48 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
It resembles a car park at an enormous open-air venue - but it is actually a knock-on effect of the Volkswagen emissions scandal.
Dramatic aerial pictures show row after row of diesel VWs and Audis sitting in the baking California sun, awaiting either repair or destruction in their desert graveyard.
This is just one of 37 storage areas the firm has around the US, housing almost 300,000 vehicles.
In addition to the pictured site in Victorville, other facilities include a disused suburban football stadium in Detroit and a former Minnesota paper mill.
The German company needs plenty of space because it has spent more than $7.4bn (£5.3bn) buying back about 350,000 US vehicles, following the scandal over software that switched engines to a cleaner mode when they were being tested for emissions.
They are not all being stored, though. In December, VW said it had destroyed about 28,000 vehicles and resold a further 13,000.
It has offered, in total, to buy back about half a million vehicles in a scheme that will continue until next year.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.sky.com ...
I would like to buy one if the price is right. I’ll start the bidding at $500. That’s higher than they might get at the scrap yard.
Wow. You’d think it would be cheaper to fix the software and sell them at a deep discount, maybe at or just below cost. I don’t think there were any hardware problems — just software.
Why not ship them to Latin America?
Better to sell them at a loss than to eat the whole loss
The environmental impact is staggering and outweighs the exhaust issue.
I hope VW realizes that repairing these vehicles will never occur. By the time they “repaired” even 1/5th of them, they would be obsolete. Donate them to Cars for Kids...
if the EPA lowers standards will these engine then be usable?
“The environmental impact is staggering and outweighs the exhaust issue.”
Really? Hard to believe.
What is your source for that? It sounds like hogwash.
You mean the environmental impact of destroying the cars outweighs the miniscule issue of the fake exhaust data, correct?
Looks like the surface of a Death Star.
My Jetta TDI is on one of those lots, and I’d buy it back if the price was right. Most fun and economical car I ever owned. Turned it in on the buyback just because I didn’t want to deal with all the fallout of owning a VW diesel after the news broke...
Sounds like it might be more economically feasible to just get the EPA straightened out. They cause more problems than they are worth.
Give one to every illegal alien at the border with the caveat that neither come back to the US unless properly and legally admitted.
I’ll store a few in my garage, my rates are very low.
Point them to the “mao zedong tunnel” entrance so they can drive to their free Hawaiian vacation.
“That’s NOT how pagan offerings to the Enviro-gods works. It has to be a consumed sacrifice, with elements of suffering, penitence and unrecoverable reparation.”
How true! IMO, VW’s biggest sin was hacking off the EPA bureaucrats.
Trump could use the issue as leverage somehow, I am sure.
There’s a mixed bag of hardware AND software issues.
Depends on the model year.
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