What Happens to Your Car When It No Longer Runs?

An abandoned car, probably a Volkswagen.  Old vehicles should

 not be left to rot.  They should be recycled.

One of my favorite cable channels is Velocity, which is packed full of shows that follow professional mechanics through 1-week or 2-week adventures.  These guys and gals know their cars inside out and they literally rebuild a car every week.  Many of the cars you see on these shows would be mistaken for old junkers by casual passers-by, but there are good reasons why their owners hold on to them for so long.  One of the best renovation shows has to be Wheeler Dealers.  The show's hosts, Ant and Mike, are experts from the United Kingdom who shop around in the US after markets and find incredible old vehicles.

Every car has a story and every car make and model has a story, too.  Mike finds the deals and Ant fixes them up.  Both hosts explain why the cars they buy and rebuild are so loved by the small markets that won't let go of them.  Mike usually takes a car for a test drive before turning it over to Ant.  He'll put a performance car through some moves and give Ant a heads up on what problems the vehicle has.

Once Ant gets his hands on a vehicle you know it will be okay.  He seems to be able to fix anything.  I am sure a good repair manual, the Internet, and a lot of years of fixing cars give him the edge he needs to turn around a vehicle in a week.  But Mike's superb ability to pick vehicles that can be repaired quickly and sold on market ensures the duo stay on track.

While that is all great for armchair mechanics like me, have you ever wondered what happens to all the cars that don't get saved and rebuilt?  A few of them sit in yards and rust away for generations on end.  But most vehicles end up in a graveyard.  We call them recycle lots and junkyards where I am from.  If you need a cheap part you just go down to the junkyard and buy what you need.  After the vehicles have been stripped of all reusable parts they are crushed and shredded.

What fascinates me about the process is that so much of the material used to make cars is reused to make new cars.  Your brake pedal, as an example, may once have been part of an older car.  Here is a cool video that follows a car from "death" to recycling.

That's just an amazingly interesting story.  It's one of millions of fluff pieces that local TV stations produce for their audiences.  And you had better believe the news media love to follow dead cars into the recycling bin.  I have found many stories about what happens to dead cars when no one wants them any more.

There is also an infamous article that claims thousands of unsold new cars are stacked up on lots throughout the United Kingdom.  The article is a hoax, recycling pictures of new cars being shipped and received at various UK ports.  Why would anyone write a joke story like that?  Maybe it was an April first joke.  Maybe they just write crazy stuff the way The Onion does.  So auto manufacturers don't really pile up cars year after year just because they cannot sell them.

There is however ONE manufacturer who does have to store a lot of cars on special lots.  Because they were caught cheating on US emission controls tests, Volkswagen was forced to buy back hundreds of thousands of vehicles.  Those illegal vehicles are stored on huge lots.  But instead of recycling these cars through crushers and shredders, Volkswagen has sent in teams of engineers to replace the cars' emission control systems.  Once accepted by government inspectors the vehicles will be shipped off to used car markets.

One of the most amazing facts I learned this week was that automobiles are the most efficiently recycled big items that we manufacture.  Old newspapers and used aluminum cans are not recycled as much as cars.  I don't feel so bad for the environment now that I know car is being taken to safely remove most old vehicles from the roads.

Maybe one day we won't have to worry so much about the environment.  If we can make successful big industries out of recycling old things, we'll be able to improve our relationship with Mother Earth.  I think she is feeling the strain as mankind chews up the landscape with more roads, cities, and abandoned junk.  But the ultimate fate of cars when they die gives me hope that we can still do some things right.