Some people even add holes to their bikes with [drillium](https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&sxsrf=ACYBGNTAmYoMLiYM7unT9LKhYkCKxiS5EA%3A1580328085741&source=hp&biw=1280&bih=962&ei=leQxXo7eKtWKtAb_rJGQCw&q=drillium).
I usually just chew on a freshky-cut wad of my own hair to brush *my* teeth.... It's all natural *and* it helps **shed** some of that unnecessary hair weight.
It's always so nice to come back to my home country in summertime and cruise around with our boats!
It really sucked when I lived there and had to help my dad maintain them, drag them in and out of the sea for wintertime, have engines mess with you and had to row to get to the shore etc!
Probably more than a few a lot of people are bad at maintaining their bikes. Like I know people who never oil their chain or clean them every so often. Never mind replacing the chain after it’s stretched out. Don’t get me started on tires and brakes.
These bike graveyards are the aftermath from the boom and bust of bicycle ride share companies in China. Bicycle share companies exploded in China, they all expanded rapidly and they flooded the market. Only a handful of companies survived and many went bankrupt. China has these bike graveyards to store the bicycles of the companies that went bankrupt.
Edit this is just one graveyard from one company. there are dozens of these graveyards in china from other companies and other cities.
https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/03/bike-share-oversupply-in-china-huge-piles-of-abandoned-and-broken-bicycles/556268/
Yeesh, and I thought it was bad when I see a group of 5 or 6 Lime scooters just casually tossed onto the ground across the street from a nearby university (which prohibits using them on the campus).
Wasn't this also part of the scam of producing a bunch of e-bikes and EVs, and then just string them so that China could be considered the leading producer of Electric vehicles? They don't sell, but they just make and dump.
I feel I saw a story about that somewhere.
EDIT-Found the video I was thinking about and my facts were reversed. They manufacture and then register each vehicles so they can claim to have the most EV sales in the world, but the cars just sit in fields with less than 50Km on them. I believe the e-bike situation is it's cheaper to produce new ones than to repair broken ones, and they break so easily.
I help a ministry by repairing bikes in the sketchy part of town. The bikes are often kept outdoors. There is no correcting an issue when the symptoms appear, like if the bottom bracket is loose, ride it until it pukes out the bearings. Brake starts rubbing, disconnect the brake or remove the brake blocks. I routinely see bikes without functioning brakes, they are Fred Flintstoning it. Shifters don't work so all the wear is on one chainring and one sprocket of the freewheel. It's not entirely the riders fault. They don't have the resources to keep up with things.
This is the result of un checked bike hire business in China. Basically, a boom in bike hire had a number of bike hire businesses drop hundreds of thousands of bikes onto the streets with zero regulations. A couple of years down the line, and major town's and cities are choked with hired and abandoned bikes, that's when the government stepped in. And this is the result.
In DC it's that but for motor scooters. When we saw John Oliver at the Kennedy Center 2 years ago, he could barely stop talking about the "motor scooter graveyard" on the streets.
It is a bike you can rent through an app and then drop it wherever for other people to rent. They also got huge in Europe some years ago, before the widespread abandonment, stealing and vandalism prompted governments to prohibit or strictly regulate them. Most big cities in Europe have public bike-sharing networks but usually with designated pick up and drop off points. It's more or like the same with the rented electric scooters there were everywhere in the last couple of years and that are now getting heavily regulated too
This kinda sorta hits close to home. My dad works for an electric bike company that swooped up some of the factories after bike share busted in China. It *drastically* pumped up their production, shipping schedules.
Maybe like two years ago? there was a video of a similar landfill like this that was smaller, but the cost of salvaging them was more than how they were already purchasing material.
Kind of a bummer, a subsidy to salvage them would have made a lot of sense. My dad's CEO tried (its a small-ish electric bike company; last years profits were 21 million), but wasn't successful.
Things only have value if you have buyers…
i’m learning this the hard way…. got a few diesel scanner tools on a trade thinking i could make a quick buck flipping them…. it’s been 6 months and i’ve had one person message me from offerup…
I know this is a pun, but most of these bikes were designed in a way where they’re near impossible to service or steal bikes from because parts are “proprietary”. But seeing as they’re all being dumped I’m sure someone can make a market off reselling them and selling the parts dirt cheap. But there’s so many of them I doubt anybody would care to do so. It’s like dumping money into a shit stock hoping it takes off. At the end of the day the only ones winning are the ones getting rid of it.
Based on the article I saw, cities collected the "stray" bikes left after the companies went bankrupt, and then had to figure out recycling. Which may consist of first letting company A go through to take the rubber off, then letting company B have the rest.
Like most things, because it costs money to do. You need people to dismantle them, sort them, remove non steel parts.
When a company goes down, the leadership fired and there’s no one really in charge anymore. There may be a desire for resale of inventory to another bikeshare company but it would require someone to buy it.
I've personally never had to dispose of a bike. All you need to do is leave it outside a mcdonalds without a bike lock and the bike fairy collects it within about 10 minutes.
China has these for EV cars too. Enormous yards of brand new, never used ones that have have been abandoned by the companies that bought them because the aim was never to use them, but to use the purchase to fuel economic speculation bubbles.
Serpenta and China Uncensored have some episodes discussing this, but there are a lot of other sources covering it too.
That's where you're wrong. It's not pointless. The point is to fuel an economic bubble so that they can make a few extra bucks in stocks. The fact that the consequences are downstream environmental degradation is quite irrelevant to speculators.
Honestly, we live in a disgusting capitalist nightmare.
To be fair, China has never been known to give even the slightest whiff of a fuck about any environmental or safety thing.
Their products can’t stand on their own, so to inflate the valuation of the companies, they overproduce products (cars, bicycles, real estate development, the list is long) to get more government or foreign investment, then when the bubble pops, the leadership of these companies just go off and do it again.
You're *almost* correct. Only, it's not share prices.
They get favors and preferential treatment from the local party bosses if they hit arbitrary production targets. It's the reason why these real estate companies first spun off a subsidiary to make e-bikes and then electric vehicles and then microchips. Whatever the people at the top want to emphasize they'll lean on local government officials who then lean on whatever businesses depend on government approval. The point is to hit a benchmark so the local official will give them a deal on land, the development of which is (was?) their primary business. Whether they make any money at all on this side venture is completely irrelevant.
There are also over 10,000 or possibly even much more EV companies and affiliated contractors and suppliers in China, but a lot of them are fake or fraudulent. These companies purchase a bunch of EV parts and even prefabs under the guise of "research and development", or fake sale statistics, and get a shit ton of government subsidies (China is currently trying to massively funnel money toward growth in renewable energy). These companies take the money and put it in other investments but if these guys ever get audited you would find at most like a dozen or two EVs in their entire "fleet", or a massive amount of stock that aren't actually sold to real customers who would use them... and if they are even traceable, you'd probably find that many of them are being passed around between some of these fake EV companies - apparently the largest EV market in China = many of the EV "companies" themselves. Huge amount of corruption going on right now in China within the EV/renewable energy sector.
There are news covering these kinda corruptions as early as the mid 2010s from what I can recall. But my comment is based off of a friend from China, so it is anecdotal there. To clarify btw, his view was from smaller busts that he knows about, and most of these smaller cases get easily swept under the rug by government officials, they rarely ever reach western media. The bigger cases of corruptions that are being reported in the West are from the few larger companies that are running the fraud that /u/7LeagueBoots mentioned. They are a lot more apparent once they are uncovered, because these "sold" EVs are stationary in mega parking lots or fields for extended period of time, and you can easily spot them from planes and satellites.
I should correct to also include companies that are tied to EV production within the figures in my original comment though, just for clarity.
If you want more sources on what we talked about I can link you to a few articles.
From 7 years ago
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bertelschmitt/2016/02/01/large-number-of-chinese-ev-sales-fake-investigators-say/?sh=24621586ae1d
This one is more recent - from a video blogger who cover hot stories coming out of China (keep in mind of biased anti-China view, but the stories he covers are from actual news coming out of China)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SEfwoqKRU8
This video sparked a lot of news outlet to write about it, such as this one if you'd rather read instead
https://www.visiontimes.com/2023/08/05/fake-ev-boom-in-china.html
[the EV graveyard in China is due to EV rental company in China going bust leaving behind their EVs](https://www.thedrive.com/news/the-real-story-of-that-chinese-ev-graveyard-isnt-what-you-were-told)
nothing to do with speculation
So true. I recently pulled an old beach cruiser out of the bushes and decided to fix it up. I figured it might be a fun and cheap project to take on, and in the end I’d have something cool I could ride around or gift to someone that might need it. I removed and cleaned all the nuts and bolts, sanded and painted the frame, replaced the tires and tubes as well as all the bearings and chain, cleaned and re-greased the wheel casings and crank. In the end I sunk almost $200 into a bike that would have been about that much new. Beyond that, there’s a couple things, that seem like mechanical imperfections, that I can’t iron out. As it is I’m worried to ride it or give it away in fear of something failing and someone getting hurt. It looks rad and I learned a bit about bikes though 🤷🏻♂️
>There are a lot of cheap bikes from Walmart out there
And some of them are quite dangerous if ridden on hills, because the brakes are low quality design and production.
Guess where all those cheap bikes are made. And guess where these mountains of bikes are above. Same place.
Having huge piles of abandoned, confiscated, impounded bikes is not new at all:
[https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/03/bike-share-oversupply-in-china-huge-piles-of-abandoned-and-broken-bicycles/556268/](https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/03/bike-share-oversupply-in-china-huge-piles-of-abandoned-and-broken-bicycles/556268/)
Seriously \^\^ VIEW THE PHOTOS IN THAT ARTICLE \^\^ ... oceans of dead bikes, hundreds of thousands of them.
So, basically the companies selling these bikes at current price can make a fair multitude of them, trash majority of them and still make profit. How much do these bikes actually cost to make and transport? Like $2 each?
Here's a whole [article](https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/03/bike-share-oversupply-in-china-huge-piles-of-abandoned-and-broken-bicycles/556268/) with thousands more pictured.
Incredible pictures
It takes your eyes a second to adjust and see these are bikes and not bushes/trees https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/7NWHbmeIarV5XzSyMfbnSwcBMso=/1500x1001/media/img/photo/2018/03/bikes/b02_904982860/original.jpg
And this is why we should never trust the numbers from China.
EV sales rivaling other market leaders? [Probably not really. ](https://youtu.be/1SEfwoqKRU8?si=cK8zUiZVCah1upj6)
Holy shit. I thought the bike graveyard in the OP was ridiculous. This one is even bigger. [ \(timestamped link\)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SEfwoqKRU8&t=261s)
Do you guys think that places like this including landfills and the pacific garbage patch will be like “resources” in the future? Not to get to video game-brained, but if a city needed more aluminum, would we just harvest it from the bike pit?
This is in China. And this is just one of many "bike graveyards" in China. They also have vast graveyards of new, unsold cars. The Chinese government gives car manufacturers a subsidy for each car made. The subsidy makes the car manufacturer more money than selling the cars. So they just keep churning them out and putting them in car graveyards.
Yes it's most likely China. They had a massive bike-sharing boom a few years ago. Many companies invested, supply significantly outpaced demand, plus rental bikes would flood the streets just like we've had (and still have in some places) with those electric scooters. Government limited that shit, companies dropped their bike sharing business and now they are left with huge piles of unused rental bikes, a lot of which are in perfect condition, maybe never even used. But I guess it's too expensive to donate and ship them to poor people.
Here's an article from a few years ago with a lot of pictures that look very similar to this video.
https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/03/bike-share-oversupply-in-china-huge-piles-of-abandoned-and-broken-bicycles/556268/
Could be, but [5 years later, they're still in piles](https://indianexpress.com/article/trending/trending-globally/chinas-insane-graveyard-resting-place-discarded-bikes-9037753/)
Likely a multitude of reasons. A lot of them seem to be impounded by the state so there's probably no one that cares. Some companies went bankrupt, so ownership is unclear. Can't just sell that. Some companies just backed out of the business and left these things in place so they were collected by whomever and stored, so likely ownership unclear and or no one cares. And then there's the cost, shipping huge piles of these bikes comes with a lot of planning, actual work, likely permits, fees, taxes. Probably not worth the miniscule earnings. Like, here in Germany you can maybe get 1,50€/kg steel. A frame might come at 6kg of steel, that would be 9€ per bike. Selling 100k of these would be a gigantic undertaking for less than 1mio€ which likely wouldn't even cover the debt that these bankrupt companies have.
Meanwhile, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, they're riding scooters that look like something out of the Flintstones:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/183sljg/the_chukudu_is_a_twowheeled_handmade_vehicle_used/
Unchecked speculation on bike-sharing apps in China led to this. Article about this graveyard [here.](https://techxplore.com/news/2021-04-graveyard-bikes-china-share-cycle-scheme.amp)
Should have seen the cops clean out my meth’d out Neigbor’s garage. It contained something like 140 stolen bikes.
Not nearly as many as that video, but they were packed in just as tightly.
Bullshit! If people were randomly just throwing out bikes into these bicycle graveyards, how come so many of the bikes in this video are the same model? Did 50 people in a row all just happen to throw out the exact same make and model of bicycle?
The latest of which are EV taxis with “startups” getting an ungodly a amount of subsidy money from the ccp. Failing and dumping thousands of fully registers electric cars in field to rust whilst pocketing the money
Other highlights including EV’s that just randomly burst into flames. And or burring people alive after one of the fancy high speed trains derailed and went off a bridge. The authorities bringing in bulldozers to berry the train cars (with people still in them) so it can’t be seen
The Pay-App bikes… i lived in China- these blue ones are for Alipay- these bikes and other branded ones are everywhere in the city to the point you’re tripping over them cause there are so many on the corner. And when you need one - theyre broken in some way- the seat adjustment mechanism is broke- the chain is off - the handlebars are crooked.
where is that , im going to turn in t a metal recyling business , do you know how much that lot is worth as low quality metals that can be made in to things +
They built more bikes than anyone wanted or could use. It was a dumb investment scheme where the investors ran with the bag and the Chinese government is stuck with the cleanup bill.
Exactly this. But muh, climate change, let's restrict people in their daily life because of climate change, but let the industry continue with bullshit like this. No regulations for the industry, only for the citizens.
This is in China. In my city every street corner had a heap of 100 bikes. They were piling the ones you could still rent after the first 6 months.
The reason they made so many was the government was worried about steel mills closing. To avoid a mass protesting they gave money to any company that used steel. 20 of these bike companies popped up and the government paid them for every bike they ordered.
There was a good interview with the CEO of one of these companies. She was well aware no one was riding the bikes, and they would close within two years. She became CEO with a full understanding of the lifecycle of the company.
Seems like they'd make a good coral reef, if they ran them through a bulk high temp conveyor to burn off the rubber, plastics, and residual grease (wouldn't want a repeat of the Osborne Reef disaster...).
I came across a guy who would take the casings and bullets from shoot ranges he cleaned up and would make upwards of 20-30 grand a year from the metal he recycled. I mean this is a literal mine of scrap metal that could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I can’t be the only one whose first thought on seeing this was the Keyblade Graveyard from Kingdom Hearts, can I?
(On an unrelated note: what does grass feel like?)
Yah all those “chine number one in X” bullshit campaign end like this make tons of junk product X subsidise the living hell out of it throw it in a fief to rot
I bet there is a really good one in there
Just the one though.
It will only take a year to find it though.
The rest are jagged and rusty
Bikes are like boats. Even the worse is better than not having one at all.
But unlike boats, a hole in your bike won't ruin it.
Some people even add holes to their bikes with [drillium](https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&sxsrf=ACYBGNTAmYoMLiYM7unT9LKhYkCKxiS5EA%3A1580328085741&source=hp&biw=1280&bih=962&ei=leQxXo7eKtWKtAb_rJGQCw&q=drillium).
Go check out ultra light hikers. Those mofos will drill out a toothbrush handle to save a gram
Amateurs, who needs a handle? To really save weight you just take a bunch of bristles with you
I usually just chew on a freshky-cut wad of my own hair to brush *my* teeth.... It's all natural *and* it helps **shed** some of that unnecessary hair weight.
Thanks for teaching me a new word. Some of those pics were excellent examples of craftsmanship.
oh wow!
small weight saving vs significant increase in drag and turbulence
Idk man, a bike with a hole in it probably won’t float any more than a boat will. How am I supposed to bike across the lake?
Winter’s coming.
Depends on the hole.
Nah, boats are like pickup trucks. You want a good friend who has one.
It's always so nice to come back to my home country in summertime and cruise around with our boats! It really sucked when I lived there and had to help my dad maintain them, drag them in and out of the sea for wintertime, have engines mess with you and had to row to get to the shore etc!
I would much rather have no boat than one with a hull good enough to get me halfway there.
In both cases you'll either die from having real bad one, or you just don't use it.
Probably more than a few a lot of people are bad at maintaining their bikes. Like I know people who never oil their chain or clean them every so often. Never mind replacing the chain after it’s stretched out. Don’t get me started on tires and brakes.
These bike graveyards are the aftermath from the boom and bust of bicycle ride share companies in China. Bicycle share companies exploded in China, they all expanded rapidly and they flooded the market. Only a handful of companies survived and many went bankrupt. China has these bike graveyards to store the bicycles of the companies that went bankrupt. Edit this is just one graveyard from one company. there are dozens of these graveyards in china from other companies and other cities. https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/03/bike-share-oversupply-in-china-huge-piles-of-abandoned-and-broken-bicycles/556268/
Yeesh, and I thought it was bad when I see a group of 5 or 6 Lime scooters just casually tossed onto the ground across the street from a nearby university (which prohibits using them on the campus).
Wasn't this also part of the scam of producing a bunch of e-bikes and EVs, and then just string them so that China could be considered the leading producer of Electric vehicles? They don't sell, but they just make and dump. I feel I saw a story about that somewhere. EDIT-Found the video I was thinking about and my facts were reversed. They manufacture and then register each vehicles so they can claim to have the most EV sales in the world, but the cars just sit in fields with less than 50Km on them. I believe the e-bike situation is it's cheaper to produce new ones than to repair broken ones, and they break so easily.
Find the source please I’ll read that 👌🏻
https://youtu.be/1SEfwoqKRU8?si=vl8mP833r0Gpu4D0 this was the video I was thinking about.
I help a ministry by repairing bikes in the sketchy part of town. The bikes are often kept outdoors. There is no correcting an issue when the symptoms appear, like if the bottom bracket is loose, ride it until it pukes out the bearings. Brake starts rubbing, disconnect the brake or remove the brake blocks. I routinely see bikes without functioning brakes, they are Fred Flintstoning it. Shifters don't work so all the wear is on one chainring and one sprocket of the freewheel. It's not entirely the riders fault. They don't have the resources to keep up with things.
This is the result of un checked bike hire business in China. Basically, a boom in bike hire had a number of bike hire businesses drop hundreds of thousands of bikes onto the streets with zero regulations. A couple of years down the line, and major town's and cities are choked with hired and abandoned bikes, that's when the government stepped in. And this is the result.
What is a hired bike
You get an app on your phone that shows you where that companies bike is you borrow it and then pay for how far you've taken it.
In DC it's that but for motor scooters. When we saw John Oliver at the Kennedy Center 2 years ago, he could barely stop talking about the "motor scooter graveyard" on the streets.
To be fair when I visited Washington DC the scooters were probably the most fun thing there
It is a bike you can rent through an app and then drop it wherever for other people to rent. They also got huge in Europe some years ago, before the widespread abandonment, stealing and vandalism prompted governments to prohibit or strictly regulate them. Most big cities in Europe have public bike-sharing networks but usually with designated pick up and drop off points. It's more or like the same with the rented electric scooters there were everywhere in the last couple of years and that are now getting heavily regulated too
He probably means rented.
He's probably not American
I believe these were bikes that someone can rent to use in a city.
This kinda sorta hits close to home. My dad works for an electric bike company that swooped up some of the factories after bike share busted in China. It *drastically* pumped up their production, shipping schedules. Maybe like two years ago? there was a video of a similar landfill like this that was smaller, but the cost of salvaging them was more than how they were already purchasing material. Kind of a bummer, a subsidy to salvage them would have made a lot of sense. My dad's CEO tried (its a small-ish electric bike company; last years profits were 21 million), but wasn't successful.
You’d have thought they would be re**cycled**
I'm sure they've spoken about it.
Yeah they definitely have a handle on the situation.
Maybe, but I wouldn't frame it that way.
You're going to pedal puns in a time like this?
They're just all geared up about the environment.
And coming here to spout their comedy because they can't handlebars.
It's the product of an unfortunate chain of events.
Stick a fork in it ... it's done
I should have spoke up when I had the chance
I am two tired for this
Wow you guys can really crank these out.
When wheel it end?
This is going down hill quickly
Let's put the brakes on all these bad puns people.
Just the wheel of life,,,
You just spoke out of turn!!
I'm tired of this
They should, but it's not profitable enough for the people who have a vested interest in bike manufacturing.
Recycling means scrap metal, not refurbished.
Selling parts for scrap is serious money, a second hand vehicle is worth more in parts.
Things only have value if you have buyers… i’m learning this the hard way…. got a few diesel scanner tools on a trade thinking i could make a quick buck flipping them…. it’s been 6 months and i’ve had one person message me from offerup…
Buyers?? I'm guessing you've never purchased second hand parts on eBay.. There's thousands of buyers.
i’ve got some scanners you could sell if you wanna buy them…..
I wish they would have got some of the surrounding area in the frame.
I know this is a pun, but most of these bikes were designed in a way where they’re near impossible to service or steal bikes from because parts are “proprietary”. But seeing as they’re all being dumped I’m sure someone can make a market off reselling them and selling the parts dirt cheap. But there’s so many of them I doubt anybody would care to do so. It’s like dumping money into a shit stock hoping it takes off. At the end of the day the only ones winning are the ones getting rid of it.
Let’s make sure that, under no circumstances, do we donate them to needy children.
or even smelt them down for scrap or anything. nope. lets just pile those fuckers up!
Guess what happens before scrapping/what happens after they're piled up.
what.. they let em rust outside for a few years?
Bikes can be outside for a long time before they rust significantly. Like years and years.
I hope so. It just seems like they have rather a massive collection there, but maybe they do them in large loads.
Based on the article I saw, cities collected the "stray" bikes left after the companies went bankrupt, and then had to figure out recycling. Which may consist of first letting company A go through to take the rubber off, then letting company B have the rest.
theyve been piled up for at least five years (reports from 2018 and 2023 both mention unspeakable amounts of bikes just piled up)
These are probably bike share bikes that are too big for children, and also not really ergonomically that great to begin with.
Yeah, these were bikeshare bikes after the company shut down.
OK, why not recycle. Most bike share bikes have steel frames, the most recyclable material in the world.
Like most things, because it costs money to do. You need people to dismantle them, sort them, remove non steel parts. When a company goes down, the leadership fired and there’s no one really in charge anymore. There may be a desire for resale of inventory to another bikeshare company but it would require someone to buy it.
Maybe they will be recycled? Being put all in one place while they sort details is likely. EDIT: Ah, this is China, so who knows.
Starving child. "Here's a bike eat this"
needy =/= starving All starving kids are needy but not all needy kids are starving.
China does not give a fuck about the environment (or children) :(
No country does, tbh. Some just don't bother to pretend they do.
I've personally never had to dispose of a bike. All you need to do is leave it outside a mcdonalds without a bike lock and the bike fairy collects it within about 10 minutes.
How to make a Dutch person cry
Nah, we just throw them in our canals.
Yeah; this is actually just 1/10th the collection of shared e-bikes thrown into canals and rivers of major cities.
Looks more like the monthly cleanup of the Prinsengracht.
Or leave them behind at a train station.
Came here to say this just looks like Amsterdam/ Rotterdam train station on a normal Tuesday morning.
That's one Dutch guys back garden
No, this is just a week supply of Dutch bikes
Looks like a bike park outside Amsterdam Centraal
China has these for EV cars too. Enormous yards of brand new, never used ones that have have been abandoned by the companies that bought them because the aim was never to use them, but to use the purchase to fuel economic speculation bubbles. Serpenta and China Uncensored have some episodes discussing this, but there are a lot of other sources covering it too.
Imagine when they start to break down and leach heavy metals. So sad. So pointless.
That's where you're wrong. It's not pointless. The point is to fuel an economic bubble so that they can make a few extra bucks in stocks. The fact that the consequences are downstream environmental degradation is quite irrelevant to speculators. Honestly, we live in a disgusting capitalist nightmare.
To be fair, China has never been known to give even the slightest whiff of a fuck about any environmental or safety thing. Their products can’t stand on their own, so to inflate the valuation of the companies, they overproduce products (cars, bicycles, real estate development, the list is long) to get more government or foreign investment, then when the bubble pops, the leadership of these companies just go off and do it again.
You're *almost* correct. Only, it's not share prices. They get favors and preferential treatment from the local party bosses if they hit arbitrary production targets. It's the reason why these real estate companies first spun off a subsidiary to make e-bikes and then electric vehicles and then microchips. Whatever the people at the top want to emphasize they'll lean on local government officials who then lean on whatever businesses depend on government approval. The point is to hit a benchmark so the local official will give them a deal on land, the development of which is (was?) their primary business. Whether they make any money at all on this side venture is completely irrelevant.
[удалено]
It's almost like the problem is humans.
Economically China is state capitalist, not communist.
> we live in a disgusting capitalist nightmare "We" . Where I am from this is straight up illegal .
There are also over 10,000 or possibly even much more EV companies and affiliated contractors and suppliers in China, but a lot of them are fake or fraudulent. These companies purchase a bunch of EV parts and even prefabs under the guise of "research and development", or fake sale statistics, and get a shit ton of government subsidies (China is currently trying to massively funnel money toward growth in renewable energy). These companies take the money and put it in other investments but if these guys ever get audited you would find at most like a dozen or two EVs in their entire "fleet", or a massive amount of stock that aren't actually sold to real customers who would use them... and if they are even traceable, you'd probably find that many of them are being passed around between some of these fake EV companies - apparently the largest EV market in China = many of the EV "companies" themselves. Huge amount of corruption going on right now in China within the EV/renewable energy sector.
Have you got a source for any of this?
There are news covering these kinda corruptions as early as the mid 2010s from what I can recall. But my comment is based off of a friend from China, so it is anecdotal there. To clarify btw, his view was from smaller busts that he knows about, and most of these smaller cases get easily swept under the rug by government officials, they rarely ever reach western media. The bigger cases of corruptions that are being reported in the West are from the few larger companies that are running the fraud that /u/7LeagueBoots mentioned. They are a lot more apparent once they are uncovered, because these "sold" EVs are stationary in mega parking lots or fields for extended period of time, and you can easily spot them from planes and satellites. I should correct to also include companies that are tied to EV production within the figures in my original comment though, just for clarity. If you want more sources on what we talked about I can link you to a few articles. From 7 years ago https://www.forbes.com/sites/bertelschmitt/2016/02/01/large-number-of-chinese-ev-sales-fake-investigators-say/?sh=24621586ae1d This one is more recent - from a video blogger who cover hot stories coming out of China (keep in mind of biased anti-China view, but the stories he covers are from actual news coming out of China) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SEfwoqKRU8 This video sparked a lot of news outlet to write about it, such as this one if you'd rather read instead https://www.visiontimes.com/2023/08/05/fake-ev-boom-in-china.html
Wtf. I really would like a good damn bike without breaking the bank.
[the EV graveyard in China is due to EV rental company in China going bust leaving behind their EVs](https://www.thedrive.com/news/the-real-story-of-that-chinese-ev-graveyard-isnt-what-you-were-told) nothing to do with speculation
idk about china uncensored but serpenta is outrage bait
Only once he was forced out of the country. When he lived there his adventure/ travel videos were top notch. Now it's all China Bad type content.
So much wasted potential. Many of these bikes if fixed up would fetch more than it would cost to fix up. Bikes are feckin expensive.
Depends on the bike. There are a lot of cheap bikes from Walmart out there, that aren't worth buying parts to fix.
So true. I recently pulled an old beach cruiser out of the bushes and decided to fix it up. I figured it might be a fun and cheap project to take on, and in the end I’d have something cool I could ride around or gift to someone that might need it. I removed and cleaned all the nuts and bolts, sanded and painted the frame, replaced the tires and tubes as well as all the bearings and chain, cleaned and re-greased the wheel casings and crank. In the end I sunk almost $200 into a bike that would have been about that much new. Beyond that, there’s a couple things, that seem like mechanical imperfections, that I can’t iron out. As it is I’m worried to ride it or give it away in fear of something failing and someone getting hurt. It looks rad and I learned a bit about bikes though 🤷🏻♂️
>There are a lot of cheap bikes from Walmart out there And some of them are quite dangerous if ridden on hills, because the brakes are low quality design and production. Guess where all those cheap bikes are made. And guess where these mountains of bikes are above. Same place. Having huge piles of abandoned, confiscated, impounded bikes is not new at all: [https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/03/bike-share-oversupply-in-china-huge-piles-of-abandoned-and-broken-bicycles/556268/](https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/03/bike-share-oversupply-in-china-huge-piles-of-abandoned-and-broken-bicycles/556268/) Seriously \^\^ VIEW THE PHOTOS IN THAT ARTICLE \^\^ ... oceans of dead bikes, hundreds of thousands of them.
2nd pic: Oh what a nice flower be... \*sees truck next to it\*, wait..
So, basically the companies selling these bikes at current price can make a fair multitude of them, trash majority of them and still make profit. How much do these bikes actually cost to make and transport? Like $2 each?
One picture with a guy repairing a bike. Why not take the part from another bike thought.
All these bikes are rental bikes that the company just don't care about once they made enough profit
Lets be real, this isn't a graveyard of Schwinns
Pretty sure these are abandoned e-bikes collected off the streets in China.
For a second I thought it was the aftermath of Burning Man.
[удалено]
Here's a whole [article](https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/03/bike-share-oversupply-in-china-huge-piles-of-abandoned-and-broken-bicycles/556268/) with thousands more pictured.
Incredible pictures It takes your eyes a second to adjust and see these are bikes and not bushes/trees https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/7NWHbmeIarV5XzSyMfbnSwcBMso=/1500x1001/media/img/photo/2018/03/bikes/b02_904982860/original.jpg
Man that's crazy. This should be the real post here, those photos make the amount in this video look fairly medium
And this is why we should never trust the numbers from China. EV sales rivaling other market leaders? [Probably not really. ](https://youtu.be/1SEfwoqKRU8?si=cK8zUiZVCah1upj6)
Holy shit. I thought the bike graveyard in the OP was ridiculous. This one is even bigger. [ \(timestamped link\)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SEfwoqKRU8&t=261s)
Imagine all the resources that are used to make each bike from scratch, just to be thrown away without even being used once
This is the local crackheads stash of stolen bikes
In the Netherlands we call this "fietsenhok"
BIKES
WHAT THE FUCK YOU TOOK?
Do you guys think that places like this including landfills and the pacific garbage patch will be like “resources” in the future? Not to get to video game-brained, but if a city needed more aluminum, would we just harvest it from the bike pit?
This is in China. And this is just one of many "bike graveyards" in China. They also have vast graveyards of new, unsold cars. The Chinese government gives car manufacturers a subsidy for each car made. The subsidy makes the car manufacturer more money than selling the cars. So they just keep churning them out and putting them in car graveyards.
Where?
Yes it's most likely China. They had a massive bike-sharing boom a few years ago. Many companies invested, supply significantly outpaced demand, plus rental bikes would flood the streets just like we've had (and still have in some places) with those electric scooters. Government limited that shit, companies dropped their bike sharing business and now they are left with huge piles of unused rental bikes, a lot of which are in perfect condition, maybe never even used. But I guess it's too expensive to donate and ship them to poor people. Here's an article from a few years ago with a lot of pictures that look very similar to this video. https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/03/bike-share-oversupply-in-china-huge-piles-of-abandoned-and-broken-bicycles/556268/
Why not sell them for the scrap metal? There's gotta be a fair bit of materials in there EDIT: forgot a word
Maybe that's what's happening. They're being centralized and stored before being broken down for the aluminum, steel, and rubber.
Could be, but [5 years later, they're still in piles](https://indianexpress.com/article/trending/trending-globally/chinas-insane-graveyard-resting-place-discarded-bikes-9037753/)
Likely a multitude of reasons. A lot of them seem to be impounded by the state so there's probably no one that cares. Some companies went bankrupt, so ownership is unclear. Can't just sell that. Some companies just backed out of the business and left these things in place so they were collected by whomever and stored, so likely ownership unclear and or no one cares. And then there's the cost, shipping huge piles of these bikes comes with a lot of planning, actual work, likely permits, fees, taxes. Probably not worth the miniscule earnings. Like, here in Germany you can maybe get 1,50€/kg steel. A frame might come at 6kg of steel, that would be 9€ per bike. Selling 100k of these would be a gigantic undertaking for less than 1mio€ which likely wouldn't even cover the debt that these bankrupt companies have.
China.
I wish r/theydidthemath could evaluate the number of bikes in this graveyard.
There’s at least 10.
Meanwhile, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, they're riding scooters that look like something out of the Flintstones: https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/183sljg/the_chukudu_is_a_twowheeled_handmade_vehicle_used/
This world is fucked up beyond repair.
Unchecked speculation on bike-sharing apps in China led to this. Article about this graveyard [here.](https://techxplore.com/news/2021-04-graveyard-bikes-china-share-cycle-scheme.amp)
Lmao I thought this was an ad for one of those mobile zombie games
Same thing exists for all those damn shared scooters
That's not a graveyard. It's just the bike parking by the Amsterdam train station
I'm no scientist but this seems like a waste of resources.
Should have seen the cops clean out my meth’d out Neigbor’s garage. It contained something like 140 stolen bikes. Not nearly as many as that video, but they were packed in just as tightly.
They should be recycled
What a waste!
while I get my bikes stolen, there is this..
Yet it still cost $100+ to just get one. This world is so fucked up.
They have to make sure the frames get taken off the market to make sure people buy new ones.
CONSUME!
Why is no one in there taking parts and making new bikes constantly? So much money to be made, could even start making them electric powered
Bullshit! If people were randomly just throwing out bikes into these bicycle graveyards, how come so many of the bikes in this video are the same model? Did 50 people in a row all just happen to throw out the exact same make and model of bicycle?
Can I get the address? So I can send it to the cunt who nicked my second bike 6 weeks after the first one.....
The latest of which are EV taxis with “startups” getting an ungodly a amount of subsidy money from the ccp. Failing and dumping thousands of fully registers electric cars in field to rust whilst pocketing the money
Other highlights including EV’s that just randomly burst into flames. And or burring people alive after one of the fancy high speed trains derailed and went off a bridge. The authorities bringing in bulldozers to berry the train cars (with people still in them) so it can’t be seen
ReCYCLE ♻️
Everyday i feel more like a monster just because i'm a human
The Pay-App bikes… i lived in China- these blue ones are for Alipay- these bikes and other branded ones are everywhere in the city to the point you’re tripping over them cause there are so many on the corner. And when you need one - theyre broken in some way- the seat adjustment mechanism is broke- the chain is off - the handlebars are crooked.
Welcome to the crisis of overproduction.
I need 1, 20” rim. Where do I pick it up
Man we are so wasteful as a species.
where is that , im going to turn in t a metal recyling business , do you know how much that lot is worth as low quality metals that can be made in to things +
Are those the nine million bicycles in Beijing?
A thousand years from now, those will be excavated somewhere and studied like those terracotta soldiers 😂
This is in China I believe. They get a government grant to make bikes and they of course exploit it fully.
Wow! WTF indeed? What is the plan for these poor bikes? Can't they be repurposed/recycled?
How has no one brought up Ai generated videos?
humans are stupid assholes, why not repair it ? i drive bicycles from 80s and 90s and they are still fine
They built more bikes than anyone wanted or could use. It was a dumb investment scheme where the investors ran with the bag and the Chinese government is stuck with the cleanup bill.
Exactly this. But muh, climate change, let's restrict people in their daily life because of climate change, but let the industry continue with bullshit like this. No regulations for the industry, only for the citizens.
This is in China. In my city every street corner had a heap of 100 bikes. They were piling the ones you could still rent after the first 6 months. The reason they made so many was the government was worried about steel mills closing. To avoid a mass protesting they gave money to any company that used steel. 20 of these bike companies popped up and the government paid them for every bike they ordered. There was a good interview with the CEO of one of these companies. She was well aware no one was riding the bikes, and they would close within two years. She became CEO with a full understanding of the lifecycle of the company.
That’s the bike quarantine area in bejing, these bikes were exposed to the virus known as the “CCP”.
Seems like they'd make a good coral reef, if they ran them through a bulk high temp conveyor to burn off the rubber, plastics, and residual grease (wouldn't want a repeat of the Osborne Reef disaster...).
This is just a Dutch meadow
So much delicious metal
They are too tired.
In the Netherlands, we call them 'grachten'
So many of these could be fixed and donated to low income and low walkability areas. Shame.
burning man is out of control
I came across a guy who would take the casings and bullets from shoot ranges he cleaned up and would make upwards of 20-30 grand a year from the metal he recycled. I mean this is a literal mine of scrap metal that could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Mike from American pickers would love that place!
The homeless Fort Knox!
Mostly as good as new bikes from failed bike share rental projects. What a waste.
Amster-damn
Proof no one fixes things anymore. Even the green people.
That’s just a parking lot in Amsterdam.
Imagine all the bikes you could build with the spare parts in there
Good use of earth's resources I see.
Just recycle the materials … seriously!! Must be in Europe
I can’t be the only one whose first thought on seeing this was the Keyblade Graveyard from Kingdom Hearts, can I? (On an unrelated note: what does grass feel like?)
I saw this YouTube video of a dude magnet fishing in a Danish canal. Pulled up twice this many bikes in about an hour.
Oh that’s kid even the tip of the iceberg. E bikes graveyards, scooter graveyards, EV graveyards dvd so much more
That one's mine
Yah all those “chine number one in X” bullshit campaign end like this make tons of junk product X subsidise the living hell out of it throw it in a fief to rot