- Farmington Hills officials are fuming over a glut of unsold Cybertrucks being stored in the city.
- Tesla has been parking the EVs at a shopping center earmarked for major redevelopment.
- Officials say the electric vehicles violate zoning codes and are warning the property owner.
Considering the fear people have because EV’s could burn all the time, this is a massive threat to environment and should be fixed (or towed & billed).
Here’s a lot I pass by every day.
Aren’t these atrocities full of nice lithium batteries? If so, confiscated cars can be scraped for parts with the batteries going to hospitals, schools, the ACAB offices and fire departments to be used as backup electricity.
ACAB offices? Never knew they had offices?
I’m surprised nobody has stolen the rims or the batteries, or even tried to steal the catalytic converter.
What catalytic converter? They’re electric.
The metal body panels that have just been haphazardly hung onto the frame on the other hand…
Hence “tried”.
Just set them on fire.
This was my first thought. But the top comment talking about the batteries and what not going to hospitals and emergency centers made me feel different, hopeful even. Like, a feeling of organized chaotic good anarchy. Why burn the cars completely, when we can resources the useful parts, and then burn the left over scraps of the worthless useless billionaire? I mean… car.
Oh I mean I totally agree, the “burn them” was just a reflex. I agree that scavenging them for parts would be magnitudes more beneficial to everyone.
Scavenge then burn.
Together with the billionaires.
By sitting here and waiting, we are all kind of setting them on fire a little bit. Statistically true statement.
The property owners should seize them for unpaid storage fee’s. That has happened in my state. Putting your property on someone elses property is considered a tacit admission of a debt when it comes to storage. Ironically there is another law that states you can’t charge for more than six months storage without a signed agreement. However there is nothing regulating how much that fee is. Case in point a person failed to pick up late model car at a towing company for two years. The towing company gave the owner a huge bill and they went to court to get it reduced to six months. The towing company just resubmitted a bill for six months at a increased rate that equaled the amount of the original bill. By the time the asshole who should have come and got their car sooner got through the bill had went up again. It was quite entertaining. to watch.
Everywhere you look in Illinois you’ll see variations of “unauthorized vehicles will be towed at owners expense.” So I don’t know what those guys’ problem is; impound them.
Tow them and fine them. Simple as that.
Towing them without putting them in tow mode will total them.
Sounds like the vehicle owners’ problem. “Unauthorized vehicles will be towed at the owners expense.”
Even better.
These ugly things need to be in “tow mode”?
I was going to say what a stupid idea, but that’s just the tip of the stupid ice berg.
Any vehicle with AWD has special towing considerations.
For the owner, yes. For the tower, no.
… What does that mean?
Every one of these that gets towed unexpectedly is totalled?
You have to use a flatbed tow truck, same as Subarus and other AWD cars.
Tow trucks have never cared about wrecking their cargo before. Why should they care for Cybertrucks?
Oh well.
Monstertruck v. Cybertruck: Dawn of Justice
The city should just confiscate all of them. I mean, at this point they are abandoned on city property.
…you mean private property, read the article.
And send Tesla the bill for recycling cost
And do what with them? Seems like an unnecessary hassle.
Scrap them, and also fine the fuck out of Tesla for it.
If they did it proper and put it in the paper for 2 weeks that they have to be claimed by Tesler, then they can auction them off. Even bricked they have to be worth more in parts than scrap…
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Same thing is happening in Europe with Chinese EVs. Chinese EVs are piling up at European ports because they’ve gone unsold and the carmakers were way too optimistic or it’s some sort of book keeping trickery to rack up the sales figures.
Is that still the case though? I can only find articles from 2024 about this
Executive bonus target, deliver x number of cars in Europe. Job done!
few cans of gasoline and some matches could go a long way to help solving this problem
definitely would rather see people
stealingrecycling the batteriesYou are right since they are made from stainless Steal and lift-ium.
By setting them in fire, cyber trucks are recycled. They return to the Earth from whence they came!
steel to steel , lithium to lithium.
I was thinking pragmatically about the availability of Lithium as a resource and not so much about the idea of Cybertrucks just ceasing to exist
That’s what they’re hoping for. If they all caught fire Tesla could put in an insurance claim and get their money back.
Large companies don’t always insure like that. They may self insure.
Tesla owners usually have to get insurance through Tesla because most insurance companies refuse to underwrite those death traps.
I’d rather we didn’t pollute things further… a wrecking ball would do fine.
Anyone know how to hotwire a steamroller?
Actually, steamrollers and most industrial equipment have surprisingly weak locks and key ignition systems. Usually, the biggest obstacle is the window itself.
The keys are usually on a hook in the foreman’s trailer. ;)
And they often all use the same key. Which you can get online
Honestly, the thing you have to worry for the most is getting caught making a difference.
Sounds like construction equipment is as secure as US democracy.
I could probably figure it out.
Or fly a drone overhead and drop paint or Liquid Ass.
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Did he park them in a lot away from cameras, hoping there would be some “demonstrations” that would then allow him to claim insurance money? Does the policy cover “domestic terrorism”?
Did you know the Cybertruck was designed to mimic a Porsche? Specifically, this one.
Except it has the durability, function and safety of this one.
I’ll offer $15,000 firm. They won’t get a better offer.
God the environmental damage caused by making all these batteries, only to be used in a cyber truck and dumped in a car park.
Remember when Elon was pretending to be saving the environment, well now he isn’t.
Elon was always about making money. The marketing department was all about saving things.
The batteries could be salvaged and used for something useful.
Batteries can be recycled, reused or repurposed. It’s nowhere near as damaging as drilling for/refining/shipping/burning oil and we decided we are perfectly okay with that.
The lithium mining process is laborious, dangerous, and releases radioactive elements into groundwater and into the air as mine tailings. Not to mention, most of Earth’s lithium reserves are in Chile, Bolivia, and Rwanda. With Western investors backing corrupt national governments, this means that exploitative labor (read: slavery) is the primary means of extraction.
It is, in comparison to other extraction methods, literally just as bad.
Mexico has a giant deposit but they insist on silly things like environmental regulations.
Actually lithium isn’t the long term plan, it’s just the plan for today. Sodium is the long term. But huge lithium deposits exists in the US and China too.
You can even filter it out of the oceans. It’s just not worth the cost right now
Batteries can be recycled, reused or repurposed. It’s nowhere near as damaging as drilling for/refining/shipping/burning oil
Why is the alternative to an EV SUV a combustion engine SUV? Why isn’t cycling and public transport?
I’m not saving ICEs are good and EV are bad but that maybe… both aren’t great anyway, especially when actual alternatives that make people healthier do exist.
Biking doesn’t always work well in the us because shit is spread out further.
Anything else but driving doesn’t work well in the US because the “way of life” is indeed car centric. It will never change without infrastructure, including but not limited to bike lanes. Large distances are possible with (electric) bike but this at least needs to be safe.
So… yes I’m not advocating for somebody leaving the middle of absolute nowhere to give up on their cars. This is not even about cities (as the article mentions a parking lot I assume it’s next or even inside a city).
No, my point instead is to question the false dichotomy.
I agree we shouldn’t have set things up as we did but it’s done and there is no way I’m biking what would be a 40 minute drive to microcenter.
I did spend last week biking 45min somewhere and back (so 1h30) for 4 days in a row. It’s not for everyone … but not only it’s feasible but (and I know it will sound crazy to some) I actually did enjoy it. On the last day I even did the last trip with a new friend, chatting the entire ride.
Again, I’m not arguing that anybody should do that, or have fun doing, only that’s it not impossible.
Agreed. The person you’re responding to is using the same logic as “wind turbines kill birds”, “EVs run on FF electricity”, etc. Anyone trying to convince you to let perfection get in the way of progress is almost certainly being disingenuous, or at best has been talked into it by someone who was.
Lithium mining is horrible for the environment too. I don’t think that’s a bit improvement over gas\oil
It happens once and is reusable forever. It’s a massive improvement.
Sure, and it’s a good interim tech until we get things like hydrogen working better.
Dude hydrogen is a bait and switch. We’ve had hydrogen engine tech forever. As for the source, you CAN get it from water after putting in more energy into it than you get out of it, or you can just refine it from oil. Guess what the plan has always been?
Hydrogen is just a way to greenwash big oil.
there are modern ways of doing it they’re pretty efficient from what I’ve been reading using natural gas and water or electrolysis but I’m no scientist so I’m not going to try to explain it here I think maybe you should look into some more modern methods than what you’re talking about.
Natural gas is not green. Not even close. It’s just more convenient. Electrolysis cannot magically be made more efficient here either. It takes a certain amount of energy to break those chemical bonds and you can’t magically break those bonds using less energy. The amount of energy you get from burning that hydrogen is less than what you put in to break those bonds via electrolysis.
I actually do know what I’m talking about here.
They won’t be, though :(
Lithium is pretty stable. Those dumbtrucks will rot there for some time, then got reposessed and eventually moved to a recycling plant, and almost all of the lithium will eventually be used for something useful.
They probably won’t even actually recycle the batteries. The packs and batteries are still gonna be good. They’ll just pull the whole battery packs out and use them in other vehicles or stationary storage.
Probably. Unless it’s something very proprietary that is specifically incompatible with everything, I wouldn’t put that past the current Tesla people.
Jerryrigeverything has already demonstrated Tesla packs can be used for other vehicles. He made an electric military humvee.
Afaik, both him, Superfast Matt, and others were using packs from the comparatively sane Teslas, ones that were designed by engineers, not by a child with dementia. I am afraid to assume what the poorly rendered rustbucket is made of.
They literally already are and have been for years.
They absolutely will. Those minerals are valuable.
Wait, where is this parking lot again?
I thought it was widely accepted that lithium mining is far more harmful to the environment than drilling for oil, and that the hope was that not burning oil/gas we offset the mining (to the point if u drive ur electric car x miles it’s cleaner overall than if u drive an ICE vehicle). Do you have information that states otherwise?
I thought it was widely accepted . . .
No. Not even close.
I’ve got a nonsense idea with no sources do you have sources to contradict it?
Start with sources that back-up the nonsense you just made up. Because there is just no possible way that extracting 1 EV’s worth of lithium is equivalent pollution to the expected 200-400 thousand miles of ICE driving it offsets.
Let’s maybe not shorthand Internal Combustion Engine for a little while lol
Oil spills are far worse for the environment than mining could be. Also, electric cars keep air pollution in cities down. Not saying there is zero environmental impact but mining is not nearly as bad as fossil fuels can be, and same could be said for nuclear as well.
EVs were never about saving the environment. It does so much damage making a new EV. If companies wanted to save the environment they would have invested in refurbishing and updating older used cars.
EDIT: Sad how many ignorant people are down voting this without even attempting to look up the environmental cost of making a brand new car loading with rare earth minerals. While destroying a slightly older car that’s already been built and whose environmental impact has already been dealt with and would best be put to use rather than sit in a junk yard for 50 years.
Too many corporate boot lickers believing the car companies based on nothing more than “Green” buzz words.
The most environmentally friendly thing you can do as a car owner is just keep the oldest car u have alive as long as possible. Cash for lunkers wasn’t about getting people in cleaner cars, it was about subsidizing companies so they could sell more while destroying perfectly good vehicles. This shredded the used car market and we are paying for it now. Literally. If you need to get a new car anyways, sure an ev or hybrid might be the way. But keeping a stinky old diesel running, while it may seem counterintuitive, is the cleaner thing to do. What we wmit driving pails in comparison to the production pollution associated with all these throw away cars.
The most environmentally friendly thing you can do as a car owner is stop being one. Ride a bike. Take Mass Transit. Walk.
That’s a great idea unless you are rural. City folks can do these things far easier than people that the nearest store is 10 miles away.
Ride a horse! ;)
keeping a horse is a very expensive thing you know… lol
Compared to what? Horses are 100% recyclable amd biodegradeable.
Cars, even ev’s. Not so much.
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You say that like it’s already happening at scale. Get real.
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It is technically recyclable, but it’s so cost prohibitive compared to just building new that no one really does it at this point. Maybe someday.
It’s almost certainly something that will get worked out on its own. There isn’t enough volume to justify lithium battery recycling at this point. After a decade of EVs being mainstream, there will be.
That said, GP is correct that EVs are about saving the car industry, not about saving the environment. Getting better walking/biking/public transportation infrastructure is the way to go. Ebikes, in particular, open up biking transportation to a lot of people who hesitated before. The amount of lithium used in them is tiny compared to cars, and the market can likely be served by sodium-ion batts, anyway.
Fuck off, shill.
Everyone involved in that business are shit at business through and through