Mazda Disposes of $100 Million Worth of Cars

What do you do with more than 4,000 cars that you can neither sell nor safely give away?

This was the conundrum facing Mazda after a cargo ship called the Cougar Ace tilted at a severe angle before being rescued by a remarkable salvage operation.

Mazda couldn’t tell if the vehicles had been damaged, but the possibility that corrosive fluids had harmed the cars was too great a risk. Even donating the cars would have created messy liability issues — say if an airbag failed to deploy or something else went wrong mechanically.

The issue of damaged cars on the market played out recently when, after Hurricane Katrina, hundreds of cars were salvaged from the devastation, slapped with a coat of paint and resold in Latin America, where buyers later found incredible amounts of sand and water damage.

Mazda has decided to build a disassembly line in Portland, Ore., where the cars will be broken down piece by piece. Wheels and CD players will be removed and destroyed, platinum will be yanked from the catalytic converters, and all metal will be crushed, shredded and sent back to Japan for recycling. All told, that's an estimated $100 million worth of automobiles done in because they spent a few weeks angled incorrectly.

A Crushing Issue: How to Destroy Brand New Cars (Autoweek)

Comments

[LM]

I'm sure insurance is paying for it. Too bad some of the parts won't be made available for free to Mazda owners though, I understand the liability issues.

Didn't a carrier of Mazdas sink a few years ago? Either they have really bad luck, or they need to start using someone else. lol

Broq

[Jaghat]

If their insurance is CNA they will never pay. They don't pay Asians. That company is racist like you won't believe.

[Joe Bruzek]

I would have liked to see at least a few donated to automotive tech schools. Having attended one, our donated cars were typically cut in half and made into running "clips" that were fully functioning but not drivable since they were on a dolly off the ground. The airbags were disabled anyways.

A fresh Mazda3 would have been better than working on one of the hacked-up 1996 Chevrolet Cavaliers we had.

[Adam]

Insurance is covering all of it, and the actual ship being tilted before it was rescued originally happened in 2006.

guess I should have read the article. :)

Broq

[The other Dan]

One of these mishaps occurred a couple of years ago to BMW with some M3's and M5's along with the rest of their lineup but it hurt to see such works of art scrapped. It didn't tip as bad as this one though. Just some crunched body sides. Sad...

[J]

Damn! I thought Mazda just had one cargo ship tipped over last year or 2006 and all the Mazda3 were damaged.
Don't know is that a bad luck or what.