BEIJING: A parking lot in Hangzhou is a symbol of the excess waste resulting from China’s rapid EV boom.
The lot — full of abandoned and obsolete battery-powered cars — became a Chinese social media phenomenon a few years ago
Hundreds of white cars interspersed by shoulder-high weeds and shrubs parked so closely to each other it would be impossible to open their doors, let alone move them.
Plants grew out of the trunks of the cars, while cobwebs cluttered their interiors. Some vehicles still featured bobble-head dolls stuck to the dashboards.
The electric car pileup was reminiscent of China’s bike-sharing crash in 2018, when tens of millions of bicycles ended up in rivers, ditches and alleyways.
These cars were mostly no-frills EVs with batteries that would be lucky to get more than 100km on a single charge. They were built in the mid-2010s, when generous government subsidies lured hundreds of automakers into the field, and purchased by ride-hailing companies less concerned about long-term quality.
Chinese battery and auto-makers used that early demand to build up economies of scale that allowed them to improve quality while at the same time lowering price. Now, nearly one-in-every-three cars sold in China is a new energy vehicle. Oil companies are fretting that the boom is speeding up the arrival of peak demand in the world’s biggest importer of the fossil fuel.
The lightning-fast development made these old cars outdated in just a matter of years. Why would anyone want an old EV with limited range when they could buy a new BYD Seagull that gets 300km on a single charge for just US$10,000?
Abandonment isn’t the answer, though. EVs are more carbon-intensive to manufacture than gasoline-powered cars, so their environmental benefit is lessened the less they’re driven. And each car contains valuable metal that could be recycled, from the steel in their frames to the lithium in their batteries.
For China’s EV industry to thrive, these old cars needed to die. They just deserve a better burial.
