Brand new electric cars piled up in scrapyard after design fail

Mountains of brand new electric vehicles are set to be destroyed over a “defect” their manufacturer insists is unfixable. While used cars piled on top of one another at a scrapyard isn’t a particularly unusual sight, most people probably aren’t used to seeing quite so many shiny new models collectively waiting to meet their demise — yet that’s exactly what’s happening in the US right now.

Viral videos show an entire fleet of EVs stacked up in a depot waiting to be stripped for parts in Gilbert, Arizona, with tons of the discarded vehicles rendered so faulty they’re unusable. The brand ElectraMeccanica’s Solo model were produced from 2018 to 2023 and were initially ordered as a cheaper alternative to other EVs on the market like Tesla’s. According to the company, they sold hundreds of them.

Manufacturer swings ax on ‘budget-friendly’ EV after defect

The three-wheeled and single-seat vehicles look similar to enclosed mini cars and retailed for US$18,000 (A$27,000) while they were on the market.

However sales came to an abrupt halt in August, 2022, after ElectraMeccanica received a complaint from a customer warning their Solo had lost propulsion while driving.

While the company reportedly tried to diagnose the issue, eventually detecting the error, it was determined it was too difficult to remedy across the entire fleet. More issues surfaced in September which led the company to escalate the problem. In February 2023, it issued a recall for every vehicle sold to customers in the US — a total of 428 Solos.

Recall documents revealed ElectraMeccanica hoped to find a fix to the issue, but that never came to fruition. In April of this year, the company notified customers it would be buying back all affected vehicles. It’s been reported that since then, ElectraMeccanica was purchased by electric truck company Xos, who apparently said it had no interest in repairing the Solos for resale.

The solution? Scrapping them instead.

No plans to resurrect bottled model

Online, videos emerged from the scrapyard showing dozens of red, white and black Solos all piled up onto one another, waiting to be stripped of whatever’s left among them of any significant value.

An employee of the yard even told a visitor they were made to supervise the demolition to verify the Solos’ destruction, The Drive reported. The outlet theorized it was probably cheaper to write them all off than repair them.

“Following the recall, buyback, and ElectraMeccanica’s cessation of sales, the vehicles were disposed of partly via the facility. Following the acquisition by Xos, ElectraMeccanica’s few remaining operations have been wound down,” a spokesperson for Xos told The Drive.

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