2mo ago

Tesla dumping unsold Cybertrucks at mall parking lot and the city’s fed up

www.carscoops.com

Tesla Dumping Unsold Cybertrucks At Mall Parking Lot And The City’s Fed Up | Carscoops

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.

Cyberstuck @lemmy.ca

Laser @lemmy.ca

2mo ago

Tesla dumping unsold Cybertrucks at mall parking lot and the city’s fed up

www.carscoops.com /2025/05/detroit-tesla-cybertruck-storage-parking-code-violation/

175 comments

Fucking tow em.
- 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.
- Scrap'em
  
  Put 'em in a stew
  
  There is probably a lot of battery cells that can be salvaged.
- Plug them into the grid and use the damn storage.
  Or take the batteries and do it more efficiently.
  Fuck those stupid cars.
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 like to.
  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.
  
  It’d be great if the ugly things didn’t exist, but since they do, they have to go somewhere.
  Yes, recycling centers.
  
  They're ugly. Probably lowering real estate values.
  
  they have to go somewhere.
  Recycling plant?
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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  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?
  
  They won't be, though :(
- 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.
  
  Fuck off, shill.
- The batteries could be salvaged and used for something useful.
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.
  
  They wouldnt even make good range targets because theyre likely to spontaniously combust
  
  Use them as target practice or give them to fire departments to train on extinguishing lithium fires.
  
  There he goes again - saving the government money. /S
  
  Yeah that's what we should do. Give Elon Musk a massive defense contract for his garbage vehicles
- Elmo would remotely brick them out of spite if that happened.
- 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
  
  That's not a terrible idea. But it does put the proceeds in the hands of the cops.
- 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!”
  
  $1.01
Well if they're just abandoning them, then the city should seize them and start selling them for parts. I know most of it is garbage but surely parts of it can go to something more useful.
- The article didn’t do their research but certainly implies it’s the landlord making a quick buck on storage fees why waiting for redevelopment to start
- 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.
  
  .. What does that mean?
  Every one of these that gets towed unexpectedly is totalled?
  
  Tow trucks have never cared about wrecking their cargo before. Why should they care for Cybertrucks?
  
  Oh well.
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.
- Bringing the property value down.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- And do what with them? Seems like an unnecessary hassle.
  
  Scrap them, and also fine the fuck out of Tesla for it.
- ...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.
But using the land for ~~vehicle~~ dumpster storage is against city code. 😂
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.
few cans of gasoline and some matches could go a long way to help solving this problem
- definitely would rather see people ~~stealing~~ recycling the batteries
  
  By setting them in fire, cyber trucks are recycled. They return to the Earth from whence they came!
  
  You are right since they are made from stainless Steal and lift-ium.
- That's what they're hoping for. If they all caught fire Tesla could put in an insurance claim and get their money back.
  
  Large companies don't always insure like that. They may self insure.
- Or fly a drone overhead and drop paint or Liquid Ass.
- Nah thry catch fire if soray em with water.
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.
- I'm surprised nobody has stolen the rims or the batteries, or even tried to steal the catalytic converter.
  
  What catalytic converter? They're electric.
  The metal body panels that have just been haphazardly hung onto the frame on the other hand...
- ACAB offices? Never knew they had offices?
Did he park them in a lot away from cameras, hoping there would be some "demonstrations" that would then allow him to claim insurance money? Does the policy cover "domestic terrorism"?
Did you know the Cybertruck was designed to mimic a Porsche? Specifically, this one.
- Except it has the durability, function and safety of this one.
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.
- Executive bonus target, deliver x number of cars in Europe. Job done!
- Is that still the case though? I can only find articles from 2024 about this
So just tow them all and impound them.
- 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.
  
  If it's a code violation for the poors it should be a code violation for tesIa. I guarantee if one of us parked a vehicle there for more than a couple days it would be gone.
- You know who's buying them, right? The PSAs would just make them want them more.
  
  How does one so stupid get access to so much disposable income...
Monstertruck v. Cybertruck: Dawn of Justice
Sounds like rage mall parking lot parties are a good start. Just start destroying them
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.
Looking at the video, it's not just trucks, it's a whole lot of cars, too. At first I thought that was an active mall and those were cars of shoppers, but then you can tell that they're all teslas.
I'll offer $15,000 firm. They won't get a better offer.
I'll take one for free
- 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
- 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!
On one hand, lmao. On the other, seems like kind of a dumb thing for the city to get mad over. Not like that dead mall's parking lot was suddenly going to become a economic center of the city or anything.
- "Tesla has been parking the EVs at a shopping center earmarked for major redevelopment."
  They're in the way of the redevelopment.
  
  That sounds more like "We're going to eventually do this" rather than "the bulldozers are here, move your shit" to me.
  
  Then the property owner should have them towed.
Everyone involved in that business are shit at business through and through
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.
Ripe for arson
- 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.

175 comments