- 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.
And charge them fees. Just like they'd do to any individual. The city could make some real bank.
Ah, they're parked on private property, which means the property owner needs to have them towed. Which means the city has to notify the property owner (they have) ahead of the city doing the tow order. That it's a derelict shopping mall means that the property owner likely doesn't care. There's also the complication of the city not wanting to piss off a commercial property owner.
But yeah, the end result should be towing, with daily storage fees racking up until Tesla comes and pays up. Tow lots don't fuck around.
The only caveat is that they're violating zoning codes. That means the city can directly act on it.
Of course, they likely have to go through the notification process before towing them, but they probably don't have to have the property owners permission to do so. More likely they'll warn the property owner a few times, then send them the bill for towing.
I imagine the city can tow, after following some kind of notification schedule. But the property owner isn't going to pay the bill; not their vehicles, why would they give a fuck? Tesla is going to argue that the property owner should pay, since the violation is against the property owner. Tesla might not care, either, they've got nothing to do with the vehicles since nobody wants to buy them. If you just leave them in the impound lot, there's no bill to pay. Since they're unsold vehicles, there aren't even titles for the city to put a lien on for the impound fee.
On the other hand, I know where a bunch of Crybertrucks (I'm leaving it) are, in case anyone has a bunch of extra spray paint they need to use up.
That it’s a derelict shopping mall means that the property owner likely doesn’t care.
Reasonable guess is that Tesla is paying rent to the mall owner. Is it usual to store unsold cars out in the open for long periods? I know they sit in outdoor new car lots at dealerships, but I figured maybe it usually wasn't for very long.
Scrap'em
Put 'em in a stew
Cy-ber-trucks
There is probably a lot of battery cells that can be salvaged.
The sides fell off?
Possibly better than the front falling off.
But using the land for vehicle storage is against city code.
You can park your car in the parking lot, but not that car...
And dealers do not randomly park cars in parking lots without permission otherwise they would have been towed. The lot owner is getting paid.
A lot of municipalities have different rules and definitions for "parking" and "long-term parking." In a lot of cases long-term parking is strictly prohibited in places where parking is otherwise encouraged. You can't just leave your vehicle in one place.
You've got to move it, move it.
I'm trying to figure out why someone would care. The mall is mostly closed. Yeah, the dealership must have paid the lot owner, so I don't see the problem.
It'd be great if the ugly things didn't exist, but since they do, they have to go somewhere.
Often it comes down to liability and an attractive nuisance. Long term parked vehicles create cover for activities, while short term traffic has a flow of people.
they have to go somewhere.
Recycling plant?
Makes it harder to spot the homeless people living in their cars that might want to park there for the night.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They literally already are and have been for years.
It happens once and is reusable forever. It’s a massive improvement.
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?
Care to offer a morsel of information? I like facts not speculation or public optics...
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.
The batteries could be salvaged and used for something useful.
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.
Spoken like a true pedestrian. I live in one of the bigger "cities" in my state and it's smaller than a "small town" in the last state I lived in, not having a car here is impossible. The most environmentally friendly thing to do would be abandon all technology and eat berries in a cave and die at 30 because of poor hygiene, your comment is irrelevant to the conversation at hand.
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.
Can't the city claim eminent domain on them and then sell them at auction?
Sell them for pennies to the US military. They can use them as incendiary devices.
Ever hear of tannerite?
Use them as target practice or give them to fire departments to train on extinguishing lithium fires.
I don’t think lithium fires can be extinguished. I thought dumping sand on them might be a solution but a commenter mentioned that the fire is self oxidizing and basically you just have to wait for it to end, while maybe cooking it with water a bit as it burns.
That is a lengthy court process. Just call in an anonymous tip to the cops that they're being used to smuggle drugs, and they can civil forfeiture them. Then police auction
I'll take one for $1
Fuck that, pay me to get rid of that for you
I don't know if I would. I don't want the analytics and tracking on me.
“I’d buy that for a dollar!”
That's to rich for my blood.
What are you going to do with it, haul four-foot boards on flat paved roads?
There's this weird parking ramp by old work. I took a drive through it once to see if they happened to have a L2 charger in it and it appeared to be all rental cars from one of the really budget rental companies.
Yeah those batteries are valuable
Tow them and fine them. Simple as that.
Towing them without putting them in tow mode will total them.
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.
Ah thank you! today I learned. Also learned that I'm part of the inferior fwd race.
Tow trucks have never cared about wrecking their cargo before. Why should they care for Cybertrucks?
Some of those trucks ended up stored at a run-down mall in Farmington Hills outside of Detroit in Michigan. Unsurprisingly, local officials are not happy about it.
Lol, he's not even trying to hide them anymore. I would like to see pics of these trucks *from afar at the rundown mall. It sounds very dystopian to see, Mad Max like.
Edit: The pics they show don't show the mall in the background and how empty it looks.
Hmmm.
So EVs are pretty simple machines. I think we can all agree on that. Like I am not a mechanic and I can work on these things (well maybe not the tires).
But the problem isn't just that a single component in these things sucks, it's the whole design. That being said, the motors, controllers, axles, sensors, etc, can't all be entirely custom. I would be willing to bet there is a fair amount of useful shit we could "borrow" from unsupervised and unwanted cyber trucks to rebuild them into something much much better.
Giant Death Bot?
More like Mechashiva
So some people can get free Power walls?
I read that as POWER WHEELS and now I want a Tesla scrap powered adult sized ride-on toy.
That's just the BMS and battery really. There's a whole lot more there.
See!!!! I knew it was a thing, this is brilliant!
I mean can you take the engine and battery to install on another chasis?
I wonder if a youtube enthusiast mad maxian mechanic got a few free cybertrucks to play with.
I bet he'd strip all the parts and make a few other retrofit EVs. I'd watch it.
Gotcha. Clearly I know more than the average plebian about horseless carriages
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...
...you mean private property, read the article.
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.
Tesla’s Cybertruck is a big silver sales flop and that’s given the company several problems, including working out what to do with all the electric pickups it can’t sell.
Yes. That's how you start a swastidumpster article.
But using the land for vehicle dumpster storage is against city code. 😂
I think you're trying to lead them on too much.
Obviously, you want to see chaos, explosions, fire, and mayhem. Of course you do, so do I, and if its in the process of destroying a fascist foreign interloper who somehow gets a pass for being an illegal immigrant from this joke of an administration, then all the better.
Bury the lede a bit. Let them think they came to that conclusion.
People don't like being overtly manipulated. Covertly is a different matter.
Nah thry catch fire if soray em with water.
few cans of gasoline and some matches could go a long way to help solving this problem
By setting them in fire, cyber trucks are recycled. They return to the Earth from whence they came!
That's what they're hoping for. If they all caught fire Tesla could put in an insurance claim and get their money back.
Tesla owners usually have to get insurance through Tesla because most insurance companies refuse to underwrite those death traps.
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. ;)
Or fly a drone overhead and drop paint or Liquid Ass.
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.
You sly fox
ACAB offices? Never knew they had offices?
Why would they want a "shelter" that leaks and randomly catches on fire?
That’s how you sell the plan to republican lawmakers.
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.
I suspect that the impoundment lot is far smaller than the disused shopping center parking lot.
I think they should just let Tesla store them there and ask Tesla for some fee for use of the thing. I really don't think that having them there is likely very harmful to the area.
It's likely the land owner IS renting the lot to whomever currently owns the Teslas.
The city however noticed and notified the landowner that it's not zoned for storage.
We can stack them sideways in a tile pattern.
How does one so stupid get access to so much disposable income...
the willingness to do morally questionable acts in order to accrue income. nothing gets you ahead in this world the way cheating gets you ahead.
Credit.
Exploitation!
Generational wealth.
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.
Think of the environment. Scavenge them, fill them with waste after as they are dumpsters anyway. Let Tesla deal with the disposal, will cost them loads of money, running them further towards bankruptcy.
Here's a lot I pass by every day.
Take possession. Tada!
Plenty of valuable recyclables and use the batteries for power storage. Fuck Leon Hitler.
Wow, that sounds like announcing a really juicy target for certain people. But if those vehicles were to sustain damage, that might mean an insurance payout. So really, there is an insurance company or two out there that we should be short selling and that should be providing security on that lot.
Oh no, I really hope some locals don't vandalize these valuable assets in this unguarded lot...
It would mean an insurance payout.
I'm sure the insurance would have a good argument about the high risk of leaving them in such an insecure location.
I’m surprised they can get insurance at all after all that has happened.
Pretty decent scam rent a stall in the mall as your sales room and use the parking lot for free storage
Tennants are allowed parking usually spelled out in the lease
Because they aren't using it for an actual dealer they just pay whatever small lease price to store cars. Normally if they leased a space big enough for all the cars and a functioning dealership they would spend significantly more.
So the scam is getting a favorable lease from a very in need landlord hoping to drive foot traffic only to actually have no one go there ever while your cars rot in the sun.
They're just so damn ugly. One pulled up next to me at a light the other day and it looked like a cockroach skittered into my side vision.
I'm honestly impressed by how many I see. It's probably just such an eyesore that I notice every one the enters my fov without fail. I always give those death machine a wide berth, as not only is the vehicle itself deadly, I don't trust the drivers in the slightest.
Sees video in article is uploaded by CheapyD
Whoa, I haven't thought about Cheap Ass Gamer in a very long time!
Please don't. There's plenty of perfectly good electronics that can be ripped out and re-purposed, which will just release toxic fumes if burned.
Just hose everything down with a little salt water and let chemistry work its magic.
Also we should generally not set fire to huge batteries. Not great for the environment.
Surprised those catalytic converter Crack heads haven't figured out how to drop the batteries out of these things yet.
I'll take one for free
I mean, if you are enterprising enough you can strip the car down, sell the stainless steel to a scrap yard; sell the interior, wheels and windshield to a salvage yard; and repurpose the batteries for an overkill off-grid home system!
Yeah I don’t really care for them, but free? I will Nazi or hear anyone giving me a hard time in my fake DeLorean.
If I was given one for free I would take it, but even ignoring the whole Nazi thing completely, those trucks are completely impractical for my use, so I'd just immediately sell it on Craigslist or some shit for cheap to make a quick buck and keep driving my Ranger lol
Then the property owner should have them towed.
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Fucking tow em.
save