Toyota's 'Circular Factory' Idea Could Be a Great Alternative to Junk Yards | Hacker News Reader

Toyota's 'Circular Factory' Idea Could Be a Great Alternative to Junk Yards

thedrive.com

22 pointszfg5 comments

Call me cynical but every time I hear something like this I assume it's a ploy to crap all over the used car parts market. There's nothing the OEMs would love than to have every junkyard be some big corporate facility beholden to them so they can do things like refuse to sell classes of parts because it's "not repairable" or whatever.

No. That's never going to happen and, frankly, this journalist is either an idiot or "playing one" for an easy layup PR piece.

Has she not done even a modicum of research?! The incentives are higher in Germany and VW's equivalent initiative already failed. Plus, we already have a similar defective market example in heavy farming equipment in the U.S. and EU.

There's just too much money to be made for aftermarket used car parts and having the manufacturer have a private monopoly on "the circle" is even more incentive for built-in obsolescence and lack of innovation for materials up-cycling/re-use.

Do they not realize that generational design means you reach a cutoff cliff for most parts? Eventually you will reach a situation where sorted used parts are taking more space than the junkyard.

I don't see how that differs materially from a junk yard.. Cars with popular parts stay on the sorting floor at an urban yard, others go quickly or slowly toward the appropriate lower value reclaim tiers.

In my city there is an absolutely massive pick-your-own-parts yard. I believe they get most of their vehicles from the state-owned insurance company after the insurance company is done harvesting parts from write offs (which they do sell as a side-revenue stream). The pick-a-part facility is cleverly located next door to a steel mill. When a vehicle is done at the part facility it gets stripped and recycled. They don’t need to get shipped, they just pick them up with a forklift and move them over to the lot next door.

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