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The claim: Photos show electric cars that were disposed of in a garbage dump after a battery failure
An old claim about a field full of abandoned electric cars has come back to life on social media.
“This is a dump near Paris, France, with hundreds of electrically powered cars,” said a Facebook post on December 25, 2021. “They all have the same problem … the battery storage cells are gone and need to be replaced. “
The Post collected almost 400 shares in 9 days. Another identical version of the post was shared an additional 250 times in a week.
However, the post is wrong.
The photos show electric cars in France, but they are neither in a garbage dump nor have they been parked on site due to failed batteries. According to several French news reports, the cars were brought to the parking lot after a French rideshare service went down.
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Slightly different versions of the claim have been circulating on social media over the past year and exposed by Politifact, Reuters, AFP and Lead Stories. In many of the earlier versions, the property is referred to as “Bone Yard” instead of “Garbage Dump” in the photos.
USA TODAY reached out to the Facebook users who shared the claim to leave a comment.
Photo shows stored electric vehicles from failed ridesharing, not dump
The photos show electric cars parked in a parking lot in Romorantin-Lanthenay, France, about 200 kilometers south of Paris.
The vehicles were originally used by a French subscription rideshare service, according to a French news report. According to Reuters, the Bolloré group operated the service until the Paris authorities terminated their contract in 2018 for financial reasons.
After the contract was terminated, the Bolloré Group sold part of its inventory to a company called Atis Production, which, according to a French news report, was storing the cars in the parking lot shown in the photos. The report described the property as being in an industrial area and did not mention that it was a landfill. The pictures show a field full of cars without any additional garbage accumulation.
“None of these cars were there because there was a general technology problem,” Fabricio Protti, deputy CEO of Bolloré, told AFP.
The Bolloré Group did not respond to USA TODAY’s requests for comments. Atis Production could not be reached.
Fact check: Photo shows privately built EV charger in Australia, botched the efficiency
USA TODAY has debunked other inaccurate claims related to electric car battery life.
An earlier claim also involved a photo of densely packed parked cars, dubbed the “electric car cemetery in France”, populated by vehicles that were allegedly discarded after a battery failure. In fact, the picture showed Chinese vehicles being retired after a ridesharing company switched to new models.
In another case, social media users claimed that electric cars caused a huge traffic jam during a California snow storm after hours of idling drained their batteries. Traffic delays related to the storm actually occurred when a “mass exodus” of vehicles overwhelmed a newly reopened highway system.
Our rating: wrong
Based on our research, we rate the claim that photos show electric cars being disposed of in a landfill after a battery failure is FALSE. The photo shows a lot where cars from a failed rideshare service were parked by a private company.
Our fact check sources:
- PolitiFact, May 17, 2021, No, electric cars have not been abandoned because batteries are too expensive to replace
- Reuters, May 19, 2021, fact check electric cars taken off French roads due to contract termination, no battery fault
- Reuters, June 21, 2018, Paris terminates Autolib’s electric car sharing contract with Bollore
- USA TODAY, July 14, 2021, fact check: Viral image of an electric car cemetery shows vehicles from a ridesharing company in China
- franceinfo, April 5, 2021, What will happen to the cumbersome Autolib that is piled up in Romorantin’s “cemetery”?
- actuParis, March 9th, 2021, three years after the end of the Autolib in Paris, a thousand electric cars are waiting for a second life
- BFMBuisness, August 31, 2018, After leaving Paris, the Autolib was found “in the Loir-et-cher”
- AFP, May 19, 2021, electric cars in France were not scrapped due to faulty technology
- Lead Stories, May 18, 2021, fact check: Electric cars in storage were NOT abandoned due to battery problems
- Eltis, June 28, 2018, plug pulled at the joint electric car service of Paris Autolib
- La Nouvelle Republique, July 20, 2018, Autolib ‘fail at the end of their life in Romorantin
- USA TODAY, January 5th, fact check: traffic jam due to “mass migration” after the reopening of the autobahn, no electric cars
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