THIS is a haunting car graveyard in China where millions of vehicles are abandoned by owners to rust and decay.
The vehicle junkyard in Nanjing, the capital of China’s Jiangsu province, is filled to the brim with cars and motorbikes waiting to be disassembled – if they ever will.
Haunting images show massive amounts of various vehicles lined up in a fairly orderly fashion.
Others show some colourful parts piled into a corner that seem to have no use.
The sheer amount of rust coating so many of the vehicles and their parts seems to suggest they’ll be wasted and discarded – or just left in the field to rot.
The ever-growing number of private cars in China has meant a larger market for discarded vehicle parts.
Nearly a whopping 1.9 million vehicles were scrapped in 2016, including 1.59 million automobiles and 206,000 motorbikes.
Statistics also show that China had 260 million vehicles on the road as of 2019, and according to international average scrap ratio, 9.1 million of those vehicles are classed as obsolete, says Auto Recycling World.
China also reportedly recycled 202,000 junk vehicles in 2019, up 16 percent from the year prior, according to data from the Ministry of Commerce.
The recycled motor vehicles included 171,000 cars and 31,000 motorcycles.
During the first five months, China recycled 878,000 scrapped motor vehicles, including 735,000 cars and 143,000 motorbikes.
However, a shocking 1.95 million vehicles were scrapped in 2020.
Another city in China is believed to be home to the world’s biggest car graveyard where mountains of old bangers are binned.
In the city of Hangzhou, hundreds of thousands of cars, motorbikes, and lorries have been left to rot in a giant heap in a bid to cut pollution levels.
The shocking scrap pile is home to over 100,000 vehicles that didn’t meet the national emissions standard and have since been taken off the road.
The car graveyard, which is believed to potentially be the biggest in the world, is jam-packed with colourful cars as the heap slowly creeps higher into the air.
Haunting images from an EV dump also in Hangzhou shows that some of the cars have been sitting in the heap for so long that plants have begun sprouting from the boots.
Several others have been abandoned in such a hurry that small toys still remain stuck to the dashboards.
There are now around 100 Chinese electric car makers, down from roughly 500 in 2019, Bloomberg reports.
Hundreds of ride-hailing companies were created in the past decade, taking advantage of government incentives.
But when those were cut in 2019, several went under and had to ditch their fleet of vehicles.
As new and better models were quickly being rolled out from several manufacturers, existing vehicles soon became outdated.