We’ve seen lots of beaters in this series, we’ve also seen cars that looked very well preserved, and we’ve seen cars that we’ve bemoaned the fact that they weren’t offered to us instead of going to their fate…what we have not seen though are brand new cars with the Monroney stickers still on the windows at a self-serve junkyard. Until today. And not just one, but around a dozen. And all with an interesting story and still, a mystery.
UPDATE 9/19/2022 10:43AM Pacific Time: Reader Andrew did some sleuthing and found/posted a video in the comments that explains clearly that the registrant of some/all of these vehicles as noted in the article is here in Colorado and did in fact purchase or lease them and then used them to harvest mainly the batteries as they found that to be the cheapest way to get ahold of what they needed for their own venture. The post here will remain with the original text but read through the comments and then check out the video linked in Andrew’s answer where it clearly shows and explains what was going on.
Back in 2012, the State of California began to enforce a decree that the six most popular automakers in the California new car market had to produce and sell a certain number of zero emissions vehicles in order to keep doing any business at all in the state. Five of those six makers came up with what are popularly and somewhat derisively labeled “compliance cars”, i.e. vehicles that were created simply to comply with the law. The makers (the top six in CA by volume) subject to the decree in order of most sales to least were Toyota, Honda, GM, Ford, Nissan, and Chrysler.
Nissan had the Leaf on hand so they were set and planning to sell far more than required anyway. Beyond Nissan, the only real EVs on sale at that time were the Coda (which failed miserably for various reasons), the Mitsubishi i-MIEV, and debuting late in the 2012 model year, the Tesla Model S, which obviously went on to show the world that the US could in fact design, build and most crucially, profitably sell very popular and capable electric vehicles. (Nissan of course started out similar but then somehow squandered an early lead and much goodwill but should get props for not just trying to brush off the EV mandate like the other makers subject to it did. One wonders what would the car market look like today if those other five makers had taken the task seriously and not arrogantly handed the lead to Nissan and Tesla while spending years lobbying against EV technology?)
But never mind that, back then there were plenty of doubters for various reasons, many of them found to be false, so the other five (besides Nissan) each produced their own “compliance car”. Toyota produced the RAV4EV (using Tesla hardware and software!), Honda an EV version of the Fit, Chevy created the Spark EV, Chrysler the Fiat 500E, and Ford the Focus Electric. These were often offered at lease terms well below market rates or sold to willing consumers, the point was to get them registered and fulfill the state’s requirement. Note that nobody actually forced anyone to do anything, every manufacturer did have the option to simply not sell any cars whatsoever in the state. Cali’s house, Cali’s rules.
The main hallmark of a “compliance car” is that they were all (except for the Nissan Leaf) developed from existing vehicle architectures with lots of inherent limitations, and usually the range was quite low, under 100 miles in most cases. Then again, the vast majority of drivers in the United States drive far fewer miles than that on the majority of days and most families have multiple vehicles in their driveway, so the cars were not completely useless, especially for those multi-car owners or ones with relatively fixed needs. (In fact, some other automakers started to produce similar vehicles as well, such as the VW e-Golf and others, likely due to realizing they risked being left behind.) However, these days the accepted minimum viable range for a EV to be seriously considered in this country is somewhere near the 300 mile mark, preferably over in order to leave a comfortable margin “just in case”.
In any case, let’s focus on Ford here for obvious reasons. The Ford Focus Electric debuted for 2012, it looked pretty much like any other new Ford Focus hatchback, but contained a battery in the cargo area, a charge port on the front left fender, and an electric motor powering the front wheels. Ford more or less bought out the engineering and EV componentry from Magna, the massive Canadian automotive parts and systems supplier but assembled the cars on the same assembly line as other Focuses in Michigan (and another in Europe). The batteries were apparently co-developed by Ford and an LG Chem subsidiary that produced the actual battery packs.
Ford assembly workers basically installed semi-finished modules the same as they would any other engine or fuel tank etc. The range of the new 2012 Focus Electric when it debuted through the 2016 model year was a paltry 76 miles, which was increased to 115 miles for the 2017 model year, which coincidentally is our focus today, but the plug was pulled on the program in the spring of 2018 when the Focus ended production in the United States.
In the meantime of course it has become plainly evident to anyone not willfully ignorant that EVs do have a market, good usable ones can be engineered, built, and find willing purchasers. As a minor aside, as of a month ago, the two most popular vehicles sold so far in 2022 in California are the Model Y with 42,000 registrations and the Model 3 with 39,000 registrations (that’s eight months of 2022 only, and in one state). Tesla isn’t the top seller by vehicle volume, that honor goes to Toyota with 17.9% market share, but Tesla now has 10.7% of the overall vehicle market in that state making it the #2 brand. That 10.7% means a brand that only sells four different models of electric vehicles is outselling EVERY other vehicle brand except for Toyota, even Chevy (6.2%) and Ford (8.7%), and outselling every one of their truck lines while not even having a truck themselves. The EV revolution isn’t coming. It’s here.
As far as the Focus Electric is concerned, reported sales totaled 9,226, presumably enough to satisfy the state that Ford was serious about complying during that time. Of those, 1,817 were 2017 models, presumably the increased range produced a bit of a sales bump over the prior year’s results.
So what did I find at the junkyard? Two rows containing around a dozen 2017 Ford Focus Electric vehicles, all in white, silver, and charcoal. Multiple cars still had Monroney labels (that’s the name of the “sticker” containing the price and other vehicle details including fuel economy and safety ratings, mandated by US law for new car sales and named after Mike Monroney, a senator from Oklahoma who authored the Automobile Information Disclosure Act of 1958.)
The cars were from various dealerships but all from the Southern California area according to the window stickers and license plate advertising including Galpin Ford, the largest Ford dealer in the country and coincidentally where my own mother purchased a first-generation Focus years ago.
Some of the cars had supplemental stickers required to be in place due to California’s sales laws. Many of the cars still had new car documentation, labels, and instructions for their new owners in place.
This is all stuff that virtually no car actually leaves the dealership with once sold, it’s either removed by the dealer and handed to the buyer (such as the Monroney and other labels) or removed by the happy buyer as their familiarize themselves with their new car; this might be stuff like danglers that advertise other features or the like.
Some of the cars still had the dealership advertising that is in place of the actual license plates which usually don’t arrive until several weeks to several months after purchase. Since 2019 California buyers are issued a temporary license plate that is installed before leaving the lot as in most states, but for decades you’d drive around like this for quite a while after purchasing a new car. Steve Jobs famously did so for months at a time and never had a license plate, trading his cars in before the time came to do so, the law apparently gave a six month grace period before a plate was legally required and he maintained a rolling six month or lower leases on his favored Mercedes-Benz AMG models exploiting that loophole.
Very interestingly though, were a few of the cars that had temporary registration paperwork attached to the inside of their windshields. Prior to 2019, when you purchased a new car in California, a temporary registration would be printed by the dealership. That would be folded up so only a portion of it was visible, and then adhered to the inside of the windshield with a sticker that enveloped it (this has all changed since then). Then the dealership would send the paperwork to the Department of Motor Vehicles, eventually the buyer would receive their actual registration and license plates in the mail, and could remove the temporary one with the sticker. In this case, the registrations were in place indicating a “sale” but everything else about the cars showed no indication of it, in several cases still having the window stickers as well as the other interior danglers and so forth in place.
I removed and unfolded a few of these and found that the registrant (buyer) in every case was a company named Lightning Hybrids LLC with a residential street address in Escondido, CA and a secondary address in Atlanta, GA. I won’t publish the street address here as it appears to be someone’s private residence (which does not mean that it can’t also contain a registered business). There’s nothing wrong with a company purchasing multiple cars from multiple dealerships, what is odd though is that those cars did not appear to have ever been used or driven. The temporary registration also features a space that requires an entry of the vehicle mileage at sale, even new ones always have some minor mileage, on these there was no entry in that area.
A couple of cars featured the California “Carpool Lane Access” stickers on the rear bumpers, yet those cars too were brand new and never used (Picture #5 above shows a car with the carpool sticker AND the Monroney sticker still in place.) I believe a registered owner would need to apply for the stickers with a registration but no owner would leave the Monroney attached to the window. Hmm.
They weren’t something like pre-production prototypes, those wouldn’t have a completely normal VIN plate and in any case there would be no need to produce them in mid 2017, close to the end of the program. Having tested a couple of pre-production vehicles, they do sometimes have Monroneys but with incomplete information, not like these did.
None of the cars had their batteries (this junkyard removes those from EVs and Hybrids and sells or recycles them on a wholesale basis although a different local large chain yard leaves them in as I realized a while back). They were installed back here in a box that took up a lot of trunk space and made the standard folding seats a little pointless. I believe the cabling went through the large rectangular hole towards the front of the car, perhaps part of the battery pack did too, especially on these later cars with their larger units.
I didn’t see their hoods and front bumpers and lights which is either due to the junkyard again or someone came in the few days that they had been on the lot and “harvested” them for their own purposes such as a body shop etc., but clearly there wasn’t some sort of crash damage as this bumper inner structure can attest to. It’s always possible that someone got tipped off early that these were going to be released to the public, this obviously happens in some cases with some cars and then there is an organized “crew” ready to strip it first in line when the yard opens.
Many of the cars had their subframes dropped and it is clear that while there is surface rust from apparently sitting for close to five years now, there is no apparent wear.
While it’s true that EVs are extremely easy on their brake componentry due to regenerative braking technology, this isn’t that, this was simply never in use.
Some cars had parts of their EV compenentry stripped off, likely from some savvy yard shoppers planning to either sell or use them on some sort of project(s).
All of them had their engine covers (like the plastic panels many of us have over our regular engines, but in this case made of a thick pliable and flexible foam) in their back seat area, obviously removed for access. Most EVs that are developed as EVs from the ground up are able to use the front “engine” compartment as a secondary trunk as the electric motor is usually able to be positioned lower in the body and and the other compenents don’t necessarily have to be in the “engine bay” either.
The rears of the cars were untouched as were the interiors, any damage or disassembly ot schmutz on the light colored seats is from yard shoppers harvesting parts for self-use or resale. That black thing in there is the battery cover that covers a large box that was in the middle of the trunk area filled with battery. Again, a purpose-built EV would have them designed in under the floor or under the seats or even used as a structural member, in almost all cases completely invisible or not affecting interior space.
If you have a 2012-2018 Focus and are in need of a pristine interior or suspension components or rear bodywork, book a flight to Denver…The office area of the yard had a few stacks of the alloy wheels stacked up for sale, none were left on the cars.
It’s obviously an odd occurrence, never mind that these obviously California market cars ended up in one salvage yard in Colorado, although this chain of yards (U-Pull-And-Pay) was acquired by Pull-A-Part very recently. UPAP was based in Ohio and I believe PAP is Georgia-based, and neither has any outlets in California so presumably wouldn’t be attending the auctions out there for inventory although there are auction companies that regularly bring California cars to the Colorado market.
So what happened? Did Ford set up a shill company to sell cars to in order the bump the number of “registrations” to comply? Were some of these (and perhaps many others, this may not be the only batch) just never sold and eventually someone decided scrapping them was the best option?
With a sticker price of around $30,000 apiece they were undoubtedly a money-loser from an engineering, production, and marketing standpoint for Ford, but still, to just junk the cars seems asinine, especially two years into a massive vehicle shortage and plenty of vehicles such as Nissan Leafs running around that realistically don’t have much more than the 115 miles of range that these final-spec Focuses had either.
I recall a few years ago considering used EVs and compliance cars in particular, they would often trickle into Colorado as used cars (and some were sold here new). Used Focus EVs would often be advertised for barely into the five figures with very low mileages, Fiat 500e’s for even less, same with Spark EVs, all those cost far more now than they did then (and have aged since along with more miles put on them as well of course). I’m one of the millions of people with multiple cars but no fixed daily need for hundreds of miles of driving and when I do, I can simply choose another car anyway, something like this (dirt cheap fuel cost, safe, enjoyable to drive, comfortable, new) at the right price would fill a use case.
These particular Focuses were not unattractive or poorly assembled, they all looked good, the materials were nice, fit and finish was excellent (at least on the bits not ripped apart by junkyarders) and likely could have been sold. Instead, here they sit and within the next two months will be crushed without anyone remembering them. No one, that is, except for us. What’s the deal?
California exports their EV waste like this is why these ended up in Colorado. Why they were junked at all? Perhaps a liability on the manufacturers part led to this decision.
Obviously. It would have been easy enough to donate them to charities to be used as raffle prizes as a tax write off, or to have sold or leased them at a bargain price to some California municipality at a smaller loss. There must have been an unacceptable risk involved in having these EVs on the streets. Kind of like the risk of having EVs on ships.
Wow, this is interesting. I wonder if Ford set up some kind of backdoor program to rescue dealers who had these things sitting unsold on their lots after some period of time. This seems like the kind of car that nobody would buy at sticker prices, so Ford would need massive incentives – but then that could encourage more demand for these money-losers.
I presume that at least some of these were sold to retail customers, but that is only an assumption. If not, was that Ford’s idea of the least costly method of compliance? Build, ship to dealer, price it uncompetitively, buy back from dealer, then scrap.
Ford infamously got around the “chicken tax” for Transit Connect cargo vans by shipping them to the US as passenger vans, then once past customs, removing the seats, windows, and trim to convert them into cargo vans, but ones that don’t get taxed 25%. At least they recycled those parts when possible.
“Note that nobody actually forced anyone to do anything, every manufacturer did have the option to simply not sell any cars whatsoever in the state. Cali’s house, Cali’s rules.”
Might makes right. It could well be time to examine your assumptions.
“… Might makes right…”
Or very often, wrong. So might really only makes might.
Fascinating find Mr. Klein. And kind of sad.
I would assume these cars have some number of chips onboard though perhaps fewer (?) than IC/hybrid models. Are chips harvested from any vehicle as easily reusable as are easily recognizable mechanical parts?
Then again, the chip shortage still seems massive and here we have a dozen or so sad remnants of what must have seemed like a good idea at the time but had the usual unintended consequences.
Fascinating ! Thanks for posting.
Wow, that is sad.
I’d love to get my hands on a set of seats and a rear bumper beam for my 2013 Focus, but the international logistics would be rather complex.
Thanks for posting this Jim..
Since they were all “bought” by the same person/company, I suspect they were used to claim compliance with the California emissions scheme. Again, the loop hole is “sold” as opposed to actual use on the road.
Also, wasn’t there some type of substantial tax credit (Cali and/or Fed) at the time?? Someone may have gotten a hefty tax refund check.
Great background and analysis. Given the scale of the California economy, car market, and pollution, automakers should have seen this coming.
Well thats a good waste of resources. Any sort of air pollution benefit became a net negative since these Focuses(Foci??) were never driven. Gotta think about the pollution caused by mining metals for the batteries, smelting the steel, painting the car, refining the oil into plastic parts, etc
That would be something crazy if Ford did set up a front/shell company to buy their own lousy compliance EV’s. Guess the accountants ran the numbers and figured that would be cheaper than actually designing a competitve EV
Just curious, why was Steve Jobs’ reason for not getting license plates on his cars? Not like he couldn’t afford them.
Probably no more than simple vanity. Having the dealer tag shows that you have a new car to all and sundry for whatever thrill that gives people. Note that used cars sell with the existing plates still attached in California, so no thrill bump for those people (unless the car came from out of state of course or had personalized plates prior to a sale/trade).
Interesting that Jobs was an AMG guy. I saw him once, years ago, riding his bicycle with his daughter in Palo Alto, and his bike was an old clunker.
Steve Jobs may have also preferred the anonymity of not having his plate number visible. I seem to recall that he had some bad speeding and parking habits, and not having a number plate to get observed or photographed may have worked in his favor (selfishly).
Steve Jobs was an amazing entrepreneur and visionary in his own right, but he was quite an oddball too. Sort of the Howard Hughes of his day. Recall that this was the guy who lived in a large deteriorating house with no furniture, and who was known to have dietary quirks such as “only eating carrots” such that turned his skin orange.
In other words, there didn’t have to be reason why Steve did what Steve did. 🙂
A fascinating … and depressing … tale. Very well written and photographed as always, Jim. I knew someone who has (maybe it’s had by now) one these Focus EV’s and several who owned or still own 500e’s and Spark EV’s, and all love them. As a passenger I was amazed by the low-speed acceleration of the Spark. As an aside, I’ve been vacationing in BC for the last few weeks and Tesla is very popular here, even in remote areas of the Okanagan and Kootenay Rockies.
Curious. The whole compliance EV thing resulted in lots of less-than-logical outcomes. These compliance cars cost much more than could ever be recouped in a sale, and most were leased at absurdly low rates. IIRC some Fiat 500e were leased for as little as $49/mo.
My guess is that these just never got sold (the Focus EV had very little traction in the EV market) and Ford found someone (or assigned someone) to “buy” them, in order to harvest the credits. It’s pretty obvious. And then they were scrapped. Which was probably a preferred outcome for Ford, as they wouldn’t have any warranty liability.
As to those crying about what a waste this is, in the big picture of the automobile industry, with over 10 million cars sold per year, this is the proverbial grain of sand. Typical manufacturers’ scrappage from various reasons (safety tests, manufacturing issues, etc.) makes this look like petty change.
I recall those bizarrely styled little BMW electrics were available for lease (not sale) at something like $160/month, nothing up front, a few years ago. Quite the deal. Probably BMW’s version of compliance. At least it got the cars in the hands of drivers, and saw them used as they were intended.
The i3 was anything but a compliance car. It was a pretty radical design that didn’t share a platform or much else with any other car.
Yeah, I was going to say just what Paul said at the end. It’s sad to see something like this (and surely infuriating when one considers alternatives like charity donations as Paulson notes above), but making cars is a business like anything else. Consider the amount of food that restaurants throw out that could possibly eaten by someone but for one reason or another is destroyed.
Wow, what a waste .
-Nate
Lightning Hybrids was a company that did post transmission hybrid installations in existing vehicles (like GM and Ford vans and Crown Victorias) and then transitioned into a company that builds EVs from other people’s vehicles.
So I’m thinking these were part of their how do we electrify an ICE vehicle R&D.
https://www.fleetowner.com/equipment/article/21696001/lightning-hybrids-changes-name-rolls-out-new-products
https://lightningemotors.com/
Once they had learned what they needed they were set out back until they finally sent them all to the scrap yard.
They were purchased in CA since that is one of the states where they could be purchased and of course they made it to CO because that was where the company’s HQ was.
That wants to sound logical, but why are the EV components (except the batteries) still in these cars. You’d think the inverters and such would be their primary interest. And also, why a dozen of them?
Their EV conversions are all commercial vehicles.
It sounds semi-plausible, but it may also have been that Lightning (a quite small company) found some other reason/benefit in buying these.
My other thought is that why use the Focus? It wasn’t terrible but hardly cutting edge, by 2017 there were better solutions available. Perhaps if you need only one but in quantity?
Well since they had been doing Hybrids they probably knew, or at least thought they knew, all they needed to know about the inverters, motors, and batteries.
My thought is they wanted to learn how the system was interfaced with the factory components. Not sure why they would need more than a couple. The reason of course to use the Focus for that purpose is to figure out how it worked in a Ford and use that for their Transit conversions.
From what I’ve read the Focus EV has two diagnostic ports, the factory one is left in place to diagnose those remaining systems, ie ABS, Instrument cluster, Air Bags, ect, and a separate one used for the power train. The power train is still going to need access to some of those systems, like brake pedal position and there are parts of the existing system that will be looking for data from the factory PCM like the IC for the speedo to operate.
Chances are they were originally registered in CA to qualify for the rebates, sure they are a business but saving money is saving money. I can also see Ford requiring the dealers to register it to a CA resident, either person or business, so that they actually counted for the ZEV quota.
One of the things that indicate it wasn’t Ford or a Ford shell company that purchased them to make their quota is the fact that at least on the one the date of registration was in January. If it was Ford trying to meet the quota I’d expect a Dec registration date as they bought just enough to make the quota based on the number of ICE vehicles they sold. Meanwhile for a company purchasing them that uses the standard year for accounting it is not unusual to have an influx of funds allocated to spend on a specific R&D project when the fiscal year rolls over.
I have friends of friends who work there and I am tempted to ask. But my best guess would be some sort of benchmarking study.
I think that the initial registeration in California makes sense for the rebate or other financial reasons, but the fact that they were brought to Colorado makes me think that there was some sort of analysis done at the engineering facility and/or studies to see if there were ways they could enhance these for possible customers.
Interesting. The rebate in CA in 2018 was $2,500 for a BEV, which is nice for a consumer but for a company buying in bulk I don’t know if they’d be eligible or if that’s a significant enough deal to make a difference. It’s perhaps plausible that the buyer had to be in CA for the dealer to be able to sell it in the first place. Some Focus Electrics came out here as used cars but I’m not aware of them being offered here as new.
There are a lot of weird things with this batch of cars that I tried to cover to some extent. I get the possibility of it being an R&D related purchase for a third party such as the company out here, and they do apparently have a CA presence as well. However the registration/purchase was in January of 2018 and led to a residential address in CA with a supplemental Atlanta address line. Some of the cars had the carpool stickers but also the Monroneys, i.e. new, so not much point for the carpool stickers if the cars were to be partially disassembled. None seemed to have any wear on any parts, gave no indication of having been driven and not many components are missing. The batteries are likely the most expensive part of the whole thing and perhaps the cars were purchased just for the batteries but then again, they aren’t large batteries, it might seem more effective to just buy a few Teslas and get way more battery for the same money.
But I keep coming back to the fact that the Focus Electric in 2018 wasn’t considered anything remotely of a cutting edge EV (it barely was that in 2012). What’s the point of buying it except for driving it around and for Ford to fulfill the requirement to produce it. Ford today can obviously build an EV and even back in 2018 it would seem that all of the major components would be available off the shelf at various suppliers without making a retail vehicle purchase, let alone a small fleet of them.
Donor vehicles! Got to the bottom of this, was going to bother me.
Go to 6:20
https://insideevs.com/news/490334/insideevs-exclusive-tour-of-lightning-emotors-factory/
Ha, yes! That’s it, you solved it, good job! I’ll update the article. Kyle lives near me now, I see him around now and again, that car in the video is likely one of the ones in the junkyard now with the others.
That makes sense! Just watched the video; quite interesting.
That is crazy that they decided to lease vehicles to harvest parts. That would explain their presence in the yard now. As stated in the video the leases are coming up soon, I don’t think we are going to get our deposit back. So they waited until the leases were up, then presumably bought out the lease, obtained title, and were finally able to send them to the crusher.
Again I don’t think it had anything to do with R&D of the power train itself I think it was all about interfacing with a “standard” ICE vehicle, for use in developing their retrofit EV power trains for Ford vehicles and the Focus was the only option of a Ford with a 3rd party retrofit.
https://lightningemotors.com/lightning-repower/
https://lightningemotors.com/electric-commercial-vehicles/
Another possibility was that it simply was a favor to stay on the good side of Ford since they dominate the target segments. They had them registered to the CA rep’s home address to show Ford they were willing to play the game, potentially at Ford’s request.
Andrew’s linked video above shows they were purchased to harvest and use the batteries. I’ve updated the post at the beginning…
I suppose that’s possible but why use a CA address instead of a CO one if it’s the same company? There could be more than one with the same name but registered in different states in which case the name duplication would be alright. Not saying your theory is incorrect but not definitive either (not that you were asserting that, I realize).
I guess it is possible that there was a separate company that used that name in CA but I doubt it since as Lightning Hybrids CA was one of their big target markets and likely had someone there that called on fleets based in the state.
Not sure if you meant Magna Steyr? Magna International is Canadian, headquartered in Aurora, Ontario. Magna Steyr is a subsidiary headquartered in Graz, Austria.
No I meant Magna, for some reason I always think they are HQ’d in Austria (conflating them with the MS subsidiary. I’ll change the text when I get a minute…thanks!
This story kind of breaks my heart. I drive past South Bay Ford daily going to work. I often drive past Galpin Ford when I’m working. Those were just two of the dealers mentioned in this article. What makes me sad and sort of angry is that I sincerely tried to buy/lease a Focus EV in the past. I’ve always liked the style and the +/- 100 mile range works for me. The problem is that I could never “find” one and if I did they were trying to make a huge profit on them. With the prices like they were (dealer’s prices), it never worked out for me to get one. At one point (back in 2015) I ended up with a Chevy Spark EV lease that was dirt cheap and I loved that car. I should have purchased the car when the lease ended.
Oh well. Just sad to think these perfectly good cars went to the yard. Like someone said above, they could have at least donated them to needy families.
Jim, I believe that this is the Lightning Hybrids based in Loveland at the former HP complex
Decisions about the fates of cars bought for a business, reflect the best bottom line outcome. No room for emotion or sentimentality.
I had a co worker who bought a Focus electric, probably a 2017, he told me that he bought it for the tax credit, solo car pool lane use, the free charging that was available at our workplace, and the range was sufficient for two commutes into work. He planned to sell it when it was a couple of years old when it still had some desirability and value.
Last year I was in a So Cal industrial area where I saw hundreds of stacked. stripped out, Prius shells in a storage yard. I was surprised to see the bodies being recycled, I would think that they still had value as actual vehicles, especially in California where hybrids are popular. Are they made out of aluminum?
I know a couple of people that have bought older, used Prius’ and they felt that they were worth the investment of a new battery.
I’d be willing to bet that many of them were scrapped due to the theft of the catalytic converters. They are one of the most popular targets because the cats contain a large amount of the precious metals. Couple that with the OEM Toyota converter being the only legal replacement in California made a lot of these being a total loss after the converter was stolen.
Pretty cool stuff that lightning EV is putting out. Suprised there hasnt been much publicity about the company, first I heard of them. Hope they branch out into making electric vans for UPS and Fedex.
With all the expensive emissions equipment required for diesel vechiles, they are no longer cost effective. UPS, Fedex, some full size school buses and other medium duty trucks(box vans) have switched back to gasoline powered trucks in the past 7-8 years or so. Perfect use cases for going EV, Im sure UPS and others would love to get some of their older diesel emissions compliant trucks out of their fleet. Swap them out for much cheaper to service EVs.
This was just a fascinating economics lesson.
The perverse influences of the myriad of government mandates that resulted in the scrapped Fords that Jim discovered could/should be a textbook on how well meaning but clueless governments can damage and/or be used by capitalism.
The car markets have been affected for decades by odd advantages that were created or just rumored by misguided government mandates. Remember “cash for clunkers”? The “chicken tax”? Or the imagined threat of government action on convertibles (when it was really just the market speaking)?
The leverage that creative people can use as a result of understanding economics and the sloppiness, shortsightedness of government is a continuing theme in American history. I smile when I think about this – knowing something about the history of railroads and the “robber barons”.
Thanks again Jim. Good work all who contributed too!
There’s a tendency (especially, but not exclusively) among car guys to overblame the government or “do-gooders” for the results of business decisions and indeed market forces. Here, a company saw a demand for heavier-duty EVs than were then being produced by the major automakers, who in turn and along with their battery suppliers were unwilling to sell them battery packs (or indeed the recipient vehicles as engineless gliders).
So, they purchased two complete new vehicles and kitbashed them, and the demand for the finished product was sufficient that the price they had to charge to do so profitably was met.
Much talk about government boogeymen making mandates on the auto industry here. Here’s my suggestion. The California law required automakers to “produce” zero emission cars to be sold in California to do business there. According to the article, which is what I’m going on, that was the only criteria. So why didn’t anyone without a current product that compiled just pick up the phone and say “Hello Nissan? This Is Ford. You’ve heard of that new California law? Well you’re Leaf hasn’t set the world on fire so we’d like to have you “produce” them for us and put our badge on them. You sell more of the car that you tooled up for and we get compliance. Win, win!
THANK YOU for finding out the full story .
-Nate
It seems to me the body shells or stripped off parts could have been sold as crash parts, isn’t this basic vehicle popular ? .
-Nate