Honda starts scrapping flood damaged cars

2 Jan 2012

Japanese car manufacturer Honda has begun the process of scrapping the vehicles damaged in Thailand’s recent flooding disaster. The vehicles were parked in a car park at one of Honda’s plants in Ayutthaya, north of Bangkok, when floods swamped it and almost submerged the brand new cars.

Honda started scrapping the vehicles last Tuesday and a company spokesman said it would take about a month to complete the destruction of the 1,055 cars. Recyclable materials such as steel, copper, aluminium and rubber will be taken for reuse, while batteries and other hazardous waste will be dispatched to authorised disposal facilities.

Honda issued a statement saying that none of the vehicles or components destroyed in the flooding would ever reach consumers. It added the serial numbers of the scrapped cars would be put on the company’s website.

The cars with swirling waters washing over them at Rojana Industrial Park featured prominently in news broadcasts from Thailand at the height of the flooding. Honda Thailand vice president Pitak Pruittisarikorn said that although the company was able to move most of its finished vehicles to higher ground, it was unable to do the same for the City, Brio and Jazz models currently being broken up.

Honda has put the total value of the flood damaged vehicles at 750 million Baht. The company’s plants at Rojana were flooded for nearly two months and are not expected to start production again until April. Numerous factories in the central regions of Thailand were swamped in flooding estimated to have claimed 700 lives last year.

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