China is Throwing Away Fields of Electric Cars - Letting them Rot!

This scam was going on in china for several years, this seems to be leftovers from the end of the scams lifecycle. 

 https://carsalesbase.com/chinese-automakers-suspect-in-ev-subsidy-fraud/

How it used to work was this:

The local goverment has been told to accelerate the EV transition. Maybe this is a quota, maybe the local officials just look good if their region is building EVs.

A local company gets a loan from the central government to start building EVs. They spend the money on a factory and a lot of the money goes into official's pockets.

The company builds EVs and sells some of them to the public, but most get sold to shell companies doing ride-hailing, carsharing, or something. The cars get delivered, registered, plated. The shell companies do all the initial buying with government loans and or investor capital, and the local government, the carmaker, and the car buyer all get subsidy payments from the central government.

Because the initial loans and capital can only pay for so many vehicles to be built, and the factory takes some money to run, the carmaker needs to minimize its costs... this is done by reusing parts from cars it has already sold. The ride-sharing startup doesn't want to actually operate a business (the market is saturated, and operations cost money) so it gives the cars to a third party that strips the car down to components and sells the parts back to the factory for a fraction of what they cost to make.

The factory reassembles the car, sells it to the same shell company, more subsidies are given, and the cycle continues, with the factory "selling" the car to the shell company for sticker price but actually only a fraction of that selling price changed hands, enough to cover the re-manufacturing cost... Almost all the revenue for the carmaker was government subsidies, and looking at the bigger picture, all the revenue in the cycle was government subsidies, either rebates or cheap Green Initiative loans.

This scam really peaked in the 2016-2019 timeframe.

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Now the Chinese government eventually figured out this was happening (it became apparent as vehicle registrations ran out and none of the EVs were getting re-registered). They started investigating companies who wrote off vehicles after only one year, so the shell companies started to have to hold onto their ghost fleets and re-register them before sending the parts back for recycling. At the same time, the Chinese government started to reduce EV subsidies... the two factors together meant that at some point, the cycle would stop, with the subsidy input no longer covering the recycling cost... I would bet that this happened for the fleet in the video.

The key way to know this for sure would be to look under the cars... I would bet big money that the batteries and drivetrains are missing from all of these.