Where cars go to die
Rob Stock goes behind the scenes of the vehicle-scrapping trade – a huge, necessary and largely unknown business.
Every car that comes into Turners’ Auckland ‘‘end of life’’ vehicle yard tells a tale to Shane Prince. Prince is general manager at Turners’ efficient Smash Palace in the industrial area of Wiri, where each year roughly 21,000 damaged cars, vans and motorbikes make a brief stop on their final journey towards break up, and re-use.
Prince is also a volunteer firefighter and trained mechanic, so he can ‘‘read’’ the backstories of cars that come through the gates from the damage they’ve sustained.
He points to one where the Fire Service’s ‘‘jaws of life’’ have been used to cut the roof off.
It’s a sobering sight. The seat has been fully reclined. That’s a tell-tale sign that paramedics worked on a person trapped in the seat, Prince says.
Another, an ex-rental, has run up against the unyielding wall of a truck’s tyre, probably as a result of a lane-changing sideswipe, the black rubber scorch marks of contact still clearly visible on the white paintwork.
One small black city runaround is covered in a fine dusting of police fingerprinting powder.
The rear passenger side quarter glass has been smashed. The ignition key assembly has been torn out. The car has been recovered after a theft.
Yet another shows the telltale signs of having gone over police wheel spikes, and then been driven for some distance after.
The gamut of damage in the ‘‘end of life’’ vehicle yard runs from burnt-out wrecks to cars that look repairable to the untrained eye.
But Prince, who began his career as a mechanic, points out structural damage in many cases that makes the cost of repair uneconomic for insurers, even for relatively new vehicles.
For older cars, even limited damage can result in a car being written off, even if the engine is intact and the car still driveable.
There’s the cost of providing a replacement vehicle to insurance policyholders for the weeks it takes to get their car repaired, panelbeaten and painted, combined with the low price of second-hand imports.
All this has driven down the amount of damage it takes to make a car an insurance write-off.
There’s also been significant inflation on the cost of repairs.
‘‘Talk in the insurance industry is that the parts have gone up 12 to 15 per cent over the last 12 to 18 months,’’ Prince says.
Cars that could be repaired are not, as the economics simply don’t work for the insurers.
And then there are the cars recovered from thefts after insurers have paid the owners’ claims. Prince explains that insurers often pay out if a car is not recovered after two weeks.
Some of these, where the damage is light, are auctioned on TradeMe, and sold to people who will fix them up and return them to the road.
But that’s a minority of the vehicles Prince handles.
The majority of cars that go through Turners’ yard end up in the hands of car dismantlers.
Turners is part of a large and necessary industry that handles the hundreds of thousands of tonnes of end-of-life cars each year.
It’s an unlauded, dirty, heavy industry that’s set for growth, thanks to the ageing of the vehicle fleet.
Just under 30 percent of the vehicle fleet is now 20 years or older, the remnants of a used car import bubble in the mid-to-late 1990s.
In the year to March alone, 158,000 cars reached the end of the road in New Zealand.
Turners handles the insurance
Just under 30 per cent of the vehicle fleet is now 20 years or older, the remnants of a used-car import bubble in the mid-to-late 1990s.
write-offs for Suncorp, deals with government agencies like the police, and some private companies.
It also buys directly from the public through its Cash for Cars programme.
Giant rival Manheim Auctions handles the vehicles written off by IAG, Suncorp’s insurance rival.
Turners auctions the end-of-life vehicles that it handles. It requires a lot of infrastructure, with more than 20 damaged-vehicle consultants around the country, and three dedicated damaged vehicle branches as well as 25 storage facilities.
Car dismantlers take the vast majority of end-of-life vehicles, buying them in online auctions.
They strip them for useable parts, and then send the rest on to specialist ‘‘crush and shred’’ metal recyclers such as Sims Pacific Metals.
Much of the metal the dismantlers reclaim is exported to manufacturing countries like China and Indonesia.
And while there are many smallscale dismantlers, there are just a few operations that can take thousands of cars a year.
One is the Strong for Honda group in Onehunga, a massive $20 million-plus turnover enterprise run by brothers Warren and Dave Strong, dismantling some 35,000 vehicles a year.
The business is a mix of high-tech and low tech.
A proprietary software system enables a vast number of parts – everything from doors to engine mounts – to be harvested, and sold, some to countries as far afield as Lebanon, Malaysia and Japan.
The bulk, however, is sold to local customers, including mechanics and DIYers.
Strong also has a massive, longterm storage facility, with the company betting that some parts it does not need for sale now will be valuable in a few years’ time.
But not every working part on an end-of-life vehicle is harvested. After 40 years in business, Strong for Honda knows exactly what parts it needs to supply to meet the next six months of demand, and removes only the parts it needs.
When bidding at auctions, it focuses not on the total resale value of the salvageable parts and the value of the scrap, but the value of the parts it needs for its inventory.
More parts could be saved from being crushed and exported as scrap, but Warren Strong says hiring reliable workers is hard.
Acar’s existence ends in a noisy, sometimes violent process.
Some of the cars Strong buys spend a few weeks in its Zebra UPick car parts yards, where customers remove the parts they want themselves.
But before they get there, their fuel tanks are ‘‘spiked’’ to be drained (the gas is sold at 50 cents a litre to staff, meaning Labour’s fuel tax is no worry for them).
The fluids and coolants from the cars’ systems are also captured.
All the parts transition through the Onehunga storage system, a massive indoor, multi-floored facility, that has the feel of a movie set for a dystopian science fiction film.
Vehicles are then sent on to have their engines ripped out by ‘‘The Jaws of Judith’’ a vast $500,000 machine named after National MP Judith Collins (with her permission), before the crushed shells are shredded and exported.
Close to where the Jaws of Judith operate is an area sub-let to a Chinese-owned company, where a small crew of Chinese men manually strip the wiring from the shells of cars, to be shipped overseas.
Everything is re-used, sometimes more than once.
Glass can end up in concrete. Rubber is recycled. Seat foam can become carpet underlay.
‘‘We had one case just the other day where a starter motor had come back to us on three different Honda Civic vehicles over some time, only to see the starter motor again checked by us and off to do a round in yet another Honda Civic,’’ says Warren Strong.
Even the copper in brake pads can be reclaimed.
The materials salvaged can turn up again in many new forms.
‘‘The next toaster you buy may have started life as a Mercedes Benz,’’ Prince says.
But some vehicles get special treatment.
There are no public auctions of cars involved in fatal accidents at Turners.
Prince will make a few calls direct to the bigger dismantlers, and do deals directly.
End-of-life police cars are also dealt with carefully, so none ends up in the hands of criminals.
Not all end-of-life cars get stripped and recycled.
‘‘A lot of people don’t know what to do with them,’’ says Prince.
Some of the 150,000 cars coming off the road each year go ‘‘dormant,’’ which means the owner does not re-licence them for 12 months and they are deregistered by the Transport Agency.
Some may be dumped in back yards, while others rust away on farms and rural blocks.
But these are a minority, in an industry that deals effectively with one of the country’s least-talked about waste-disposal industries.
‘‘We had one case just the other day where a starter motor had come back to us on three different Honda Civic vehicles over some time, only to see the starter motor again checked by us and off to do a round in yet another Honda Civic.’’
Warren Strong