Is it true that the photo shows an “electric car graveyard” in France?

Photos have been circulating on social networks showing rows of electric vehicles whose batteries allegedly ran out and now the cars are “buried alive in one of the green fields” in France. We have verified the accuracy of these images.

In May 2021, photographs depicting the French “electric vehicle cemetery” appeared in several public pages on VKontakte, such as "Voice of Mordor" And "Today | News". The picture was also distributed in Twitter. The authors of such messages claimed that the cars had run out of battery power, replacing them with new ones was too expensive, and it was impossible to recycle them. Users come to the conclusion that supposedly “green” electric cars actually harm the environment. Two months later on social networks published another image, in which the cars are located more chaotically, but the meaning of the captions and comments remains the same.

The French media reported about the “car cemetery” near Paris a couple of months before Russian media and social network users drew attention to them. So, April 2 on the AuroPlus portal came out note "Open-air Autolib cemetery discovered." Three days later on the FranceTVInfo website there was published material “What will happen to the pile of Autolib cars accumulated in the “graveyard” in Romorantin?” In these articles you can find the same photos that were distributed by social network users, as well as images of this place taken from other angles. They appear on the Internet started back in March 2021.

However, captions for photographs on the Internet often mislead readers. Autolib, mentioned in the French press, is a company that provided electric cars for car sharing. The service began operating in Paris in 2011 and became very popular - according to The Guardian, in mid-2015 it enjoyed more than 150,000 people. It is the growth of popularity brought to the problems: 4,000 cars in the fleet were not enough for everyone, the culture of using carsharing cars was not yet sufficiently developed, and competing services, along with Uber and other taxi ordering applications, were conquering the market. In 2018, Autolib's work was discontinued due to accumulated debts.

After the closure of the service, most electric vehicles sold or dismantled for parts. However, some of the cars remained on the site near Romorantin - they were the ones depicted in photographs with the “electric car graveyard”. Let us emphasize that these vehicles ended up there not because of dead batteries, but due to the closure of the car sharing service.

The electric cars that belonged to Autolib were transferred to two companies: Autobuzz and Atis Production, which are engaged in their further sale. Autobuzz representative in May 2019 reported, that they repair and sell about 50 electric cars at a discount every month. The so-called “graveyard” belongs to Atis Production. Her representative assuredthat the batteries were removed from the cars, and the electric cars themselves will not be sent to a landfill, but will be sold differently. Moreover, representatives of the French authorities who inspected the parking lot confirmed this information and did not find a significant threat to the environment.

Another photograph, which supposedly depicts an “electric car cemetery,” was, contrary to comments from Internet users, taken thousands of kilometers from France. This photo June 19, 2021 published on his Instagram, a Polish photographer under the nickname @gregabandoned. He told USA Today, which took the photo on May 3 in China, but refused to name the location of the shooting. Fact checkers from AFP found outthat the photographs were taken in the vicinity of the city of Hangzhou. According to them, the “electric vehicle graveyard” has existed there since 2019, and the cars belong to the Microcity company. And in this case, the reason for the appearance of such a cluster of cars was not dead batteries. The Microcity manager reported that most of these electric cars were simply outdated and were replaced with more modern ones. However, he did not specify whether the batteries were removed from these cars.

Mostly not true

What do our verdicts mean?

Read on the topic:

1. Snopes. Were These Electric Cars Abandoned Because Their Batteries Failed?
2. Les Observateurs. Quand le fiasco des Autolib’ devient une intox pour des Américains anti-voitures électriques
3. USA Today. Fact check: Viral image of an electric car 'cemetery' shows vehicles from a ride-share company in China
4. AFP Fact Check. This photo does not show an 'electric car cemetery' in France
5. Reuters. Fact Check — Electric cars taken off French roads due to contract termination, not battery fault