The whole time I was reading
this story, I was going tsk, tsk, tsk...
Mazda out to destroy
$100 million worth of new cars
April 30,
2008
PORTLAND, Ore. – “Fire
in the hole!” shouts Ron Hoodenpyle, covering his ears and stepping
away from a brand-new Mazda 3 he just wired with special
detonators. Suddenly, all six of the car's airbags explode at
once.
Within hours the metallic blue sedan will be drained, gutted,
squished and shredded – one of thousands to meet the same fate
here. The cars are so new, most don't even have 10 miles on the
odometer.
Auto makers usually try to find the best way to build new
vehicles. These days, Mazda Motor Corp. is busy figuring out how to
most efficiently destroy them.
It all started about two years ago, when a ship carrying 4,703
shiny new Mazdas nearly sank in the Pacific. The freighter, the
Cougar Ace, spent weeks bobbing on the high seas, listing at a
severe 60-degree angle, before finally being righted.
The mishap created a dilemma: What to do with the cars? They had
remained safely strapped down throughout the ordeal – but no one
knew for sure what damage, if any, might be caused by dangling cars
at such a steep angle for so long. Might corrosive fluids seep into
chambers where they don't belong? Was the Cougar Ace now full of
lemons?
The Japanese car maker, controlled by Ford Motor Corp., easily
could have found takers for the vehicles. Hundreds of people called
about buying cheap Mazdas. Schools wanted them for auto-shop
courses.Mazda turned everyone away. It worried about getting sued
someday if, say, an air-bag failed to fire properly due to
overexposure to salty sea air.
It also worried that scammers might find a way to spirit the
cars abroad to sell as new. That happened to thousands of so-called
“Katrina cars” salvaged from New Orleans' flooding three years ago.
Those cars – their electronics gone haywire and sand in the engines
– were given a paint job and unloaded in Latin America on
unsuspecting buyers, damaging auto makers' reputations.
Mazda saw no easy way to guard against these outcomes. So it
decided to destroy approximately $100 million worth of factory-new
automobiles.
It turns out that wrecking cars isn't a simple matter. “We had
to create a disassembly line, basically,” says Bob Turbett, the
Mazda executive overseeing the destruction process.
It took more than a year to devise a plan that satisfied
everyone. The city of Portland wanted assurance that nearly 5,000
cars' worth of antifreeze, brake fluid and other hazardous goop
wasn't mishandled. Insurers covering Mazda's losses wanted to be
sure the company wouldn't resell any cars or parts – thereby
profiting on the side. So every steel-alloy wheel has to be sliced,
every battery rendered inoperable, and every tire damaged beyond
repair. All CD players must get smashed.
Little things make a big difference. For instance, most of the
cars have six airbags, and discharging them individually ( forcing
them to inflate so they can't be resold) takes about five minutes
apiece – or a total of a half-hour per car. So engineers back at
Mazda's headquarters, in Hiroshima, fashioned a device that can
discharge all six at once. Multiplied by 4,703 cars, that trick
alone saved months of work.
Mazda declined to put a price tag on the demolition, which was
covered by insurance. The company says all its insurance claims
have been settled.
The process runs with startling efficiency. It begins when
longshoremen take the cars from the freighter and drive them to a
nearby lot where the airbags get destroyed by men like
Hoodenpyle.
On a recent day, dressed in a white jumpsuit and wearing
goggles, he twiddled a few knobs on his special airbag detonator,
and pushed a button. The staccato pop-pop-pop of exploding bags
sounded like the muffled gunshots of a wise-guy assassination in a
gangster film.
A forklift next piles the cars onto trailers for a brief ride to
Pacific Car Crushing. There it takes about 45 minutes to prepare
each Mazda for flattening. Steel-alloy wheels are sliced with
high-power saws to make sure they won't be resold. Holes are
drilled into every tire.
The cars get placed into a crusher that applies 25,000 pounds
per square inch of pressure, flattening them into colorful
slabs.
Next stop: Schnitzer Steel, a salvage yard down on the
waterfront that's home to an immense metal grinder.
Moments later, metal shards – most no bigger than an ashtray –
sprinkle onto a mountain of scrap near Schnitzer's dock. There, a
freighter prepares to take the scrap back to Asia where it will get
recycled.
Wilson looks on and concludes: “It'll all probably end up coming
back as cars.”
