The claim

These electric motorcycles have reached the end of their battery life. Disposal is too expensive and dangerous. That's why they are simply left here to rot.

Our conclusion

Video shows a collection point for motorcycles from the Chinese company Meituan. Too many companies wanted to profit from the booming market for rental vehicles. They are collected to be moved to another city or recycled.

Also found on other channels: Current video with false claims

The above video has only been copied, the accompanying text has been translated from English:

Electric green scooters that have reached the end of battery life. Due to the batteries being so expensive to replace, electric scooters are abandoned because disposing of them any other way is dangerous and expensive.

@Xx17965797N on Twitter

A Polish FB page even claims that the pictures come from France:

Zielona energia co? Francuskie cmentarzysko e-skuterów. Tak bardzo eko.

Green energy what? The French e-scooter cemetery. So very ecological.

The video can also be found on TikTok and Weibo.com. Let me tell you in advance: It was not recorded in France, but in China. And the claim about the battery is also not true. But what's really behind it?

The Chinese sharing economy…

1.4 billion people live in China and there are over 100 megacities in the country. The awakened giant is not only an export heavyweight, but is - just ahead of the EU and behind the USA - the second largest economy in the world. So if something goes wrong there, it will happen on a correspondingly larger scale. We have all seen the pictures of Chinese “bicycle graveyards” before. The filmmaker Guoyong Wu has been traveling through the People's Republic since 2018 and captured it in his short film “No place to place”:

___STEADY_PAYWALL___

The sharing economy kingdom continued to grow in 2021. Namely by a full 9.2 percent, as the State Council of the People's Republic of China reports on its English-language website. The total turnover of this industry was 3.7 trillion yuan (502 billion euros) last year. This applies, for example, to shared office space, which increased by a whopping 26.2%. Revenue from online takeaway services has grown to the point where it accounted for 21.4 percent of the Chinese catering industry's total revenue last year.

... and its dark sides

In China you can now almost all of your daily needs. An El Dorado for start-ups that are always coming up with new things: rental batteries for cell phones , sports equipment , sleeping capsules (similar to the Japanese coffin hotels) or umbrellas . In some cases, it is the municipalities themselves that offer such services, such as washing machines on the streets of Shanghai. Time and time again, business ideas like this go terribly wrong:

A Chinese umbrella-sharing start-up just lost nearly all of its 300,000 umbrellas.

A Chinese umbrella-sharing startup just lost almost all of its 300,000 umbrellas.

picked up by The Washington Post

Rental bikes have often been called one of four new great inventions , at a time of mass entrepreneurship and innovation. In 2015, the first digital rental bike system that does not require a docking station was introduced on the Beijing University campus. It has been touted as a major solution to the “last mile” problem and a “green way to travel.” In the following two years, more than 70 companies across China began marketing bike sharing. The individual brands could be easily recognized by their different colors. Around 27 million such bikes in major Chinese cities meant that space was becoming tight.

Still described a booming market first images of collections of unwanted rental bikes emerged a month later. Long committed to a laissez-faire policy, it took until September for the Chinese government to grasp the full extent of the problem and pass legislation that would limit the number of rental bikes. Surplus bikes were collected and stored at “temporary” locations.

As a result, many bike share companies went bankrupt and the market shrank again to just a few companies . Their users' deposits - amounting to billions of yuan - were never returned. The bicycles - also worth billions of yuan - became abandoned and became urban waste. At the beginning of 2018, photographer Guoyong Wu his project, which attracted worldwide attention. He captured the 50 bicycle cemeteries that he visited across the country by the end of 2020 in the film “No Place To Place – The Wonders of Shared Bicycle Graveyards in China”.

Meituan and its everything app


The logo on the parked electric motorcycles belongs to the Meituan company. Founded in 2010 by Wang Xing, it specializes in online services. The website and app provide food delivery, consumer goods and other retail services in over 1,000 Chinese cities. Meituan became really big when it merged with a competitor to form Meituan-Dianping in 2015. The listed group has since been renamed Meituan. The “super app” is very popular because it can be used to order almost anything online. Electronic payment and evaluation of services is also integrated. In an image spot from 2019 it looks like this:


The platform that Meituan offers is also very interesting for small businesses. Customers order directly from a retailer in their area via the app and receive their order directly to their door within an hour Similar to Europe, the pandemic has had a massive impact on people's shopping behavior In addition to food, groceries and medical products, people are now increasingly buying books, mobile phones and sports and fitness products - preferably from the retailer around the corner, ordered and paid for via an app, delivered by Meituan employees on scooters.

Changes at Meituan

In order to be able to compete against its biggest competitor Alibaba and its bike share subsidiary Ofo, Meituan bought the bike rental company Mobike in April 2018. The two rivals burned billions in the price war At the end of the year, Mobike announced an end to this strategy and gradually withdrew from other countries from 2019 onwards. The system for online booking and free parking of vehicles has been integrated into the Meituan app.

With Meituan's entry into the robot manufacturer PuduTech and the test of autonomous vehicles in 2020, the group wants to break new ground in food delivery. The drone delivery tests that began in 2017 were already so far advanced in June 2021 that Meituan presented its delivery concept at an artificial intelligence trade fair . According to Meituan Academy of Robotics Shenzhen, almost three million deliveries have already been delivered autonomously by November 2022. E-motorcycles with human delivery drivers are a phased-out model.

E-motorcycle / Image: Meituan
Image: Meituan

However, Meituan's rental scooters are still easy and cheap to rent, as this TikTok video from September shows:

@evstevepan Share electric scooter in China #electricscooter #china #vlog ♬ original sound – EV Steve

Trip to Changsha

Photographer Guoyong Wu doesn't just focus on bicycle cemeteries. Because as quickly as they appeared, they disappeared again, as he writes. From 2019 onwards, he was able to identify other types of cemeteries for unneeded vehicles during his travels: rental cars (again with a great video ) and motorcycles. Similar to bicycles, the main reasons are a mixture of uncontrolled growth, vandalism, financial problems of the operators as well as the removal of subsidies and greater government intervention in the market.

At the end of 2020, following clues on internet forums, Guoyong Wu traveled to Changsha to investigate rumors of 40 hidden motorcycle cemeteries. In the end he could only find three. Workers who worked near the “graveyard” told him that these motorcycles appeared in late November 2020 and they were transported one by one in vans. At that time, according to a daily newspaper, there were a total of 500,000 shared motorcycles and a further 160,000 corresponding bicycles in the city - with a population of 8.65 million.

An incident at the end of October sparked a major clean-up operation. Because of the many motorcycles standing around blocking entire lanes of traffic, the fire department couldn't get through and therefore couldn't get to a suicide in time. The event caused huge waves. Several rental scooter providers therefore had to remove unused vehicles from the cityscape. Meituan, among other providers, had to remove 107,000 of its motorcycles. The upper limit for all providers combined is now 100,000.

According to Huxiu, a consumer protection platform, the typical useful life of such e-motorcycles is around four years. Continuous operation and outdoor storage would shorten that to about three years. But this only applies if the batteries are regularly maintained. In the worst case, such batteries only last three to six months.

After China endured the worst effects of the pandemic in 2020, a large number of electric motorcycles flooded the city of Changsha. They were used for perhaps half a year, sometimes less, and were left outside the entire time. Even if some of them survived this well, it is still difficult to accommodate the huge number of 400,000 of these vehicles in neighboring cities.

Graveyard of electric motorcycles

In December 2020, Guoyong Wu traveled to Changsha to follow up on the clues. He eventually found three such “graveyards” of motorcycles that had been cleared away. The largest of these was the Meituan parking lot. A sight that inspires poetic words:

The motorcycles were stacked close together, and an employee lining them up got lost in a sea of ​​black and yellow vehicles. The occasional car driving past the iron-clad factory hall and driving through a motorcycle graveyard larger than a football field give the image a feeling of authenticity.

Author Li Ling in his text about the 400,000 abandoned “zombie bikes”

Guoyong Wu estimated the number of Meituan motorcycles at around 100,000 using drone footage. In contrast to the previous colorful piles of bicycles, the vehicles here were parked in an orderly manner. Meituan told Huxiu that these are unauthorized vehicles confiscated as part of Changsha City's cleanup efforts, and that they are being attended to around the clock by dedicated staff.

MIMIKAMA
Screenshot of the video 400,000 abandoned “zombie bikes”

I've always thought that bike waste was so big that it was concerning and I thought things were moving in a good direction. But I didn't expect that several years after the bike sharing shooting, the same companies would still be there, repeating the same barbaric pattern, and I couldn't stand that. I'm disappointed.

Photographer Guoyong Wu on the motorcycle graveyards in Changsha

The city of Changsa has learned its lesson. Meituan too?

The total number of rental vehicles in the city is now limited and every single vehicle must now have a license. They may only be brought into residential areas that also have appropriate parking facilities. Only one motorcycle per person can be rented at a time via the apps. They must also function offline and there must be at least one dispatch vehicle for every 500 vehicles.

Meituan and the other affected operators claimed they were storing the excess vehicles in other cities. With this number and similar upper limits, it is difficult to imagine this within a short period of time. The batteries of the e-scooters suffered from the storage conditions. They were operated by providers for around two years, and the batteries have a remaining useful life of one year. What then?

MIMIKAMA
Screenshot of the video 400,000 abandoned “zombie bikes”

There are two strategies: complete scrapping by specialized recycling companies or dismantling and reusing certain parts. China now has higher environmental standards that require parts used in e-motorcycles to be made from recyclable materials.

Similar to bicycles, the number of national providers of electric scooters has now shrunk. Three major platforms divide the market and there are fewer vehicles on China's roads. They are called Hello, Qingju and Meituan. Rental is still a potential billion-dollar business in which a lot is being invested, as only around a third of China's major cities had been developed at the beginning of 2021.

CONCLUSION

The shared video shows an electric motorcycle cemetery in China. However, we couldn't find out the exact location. The vehicles you see belong to the Meituan company. They were not put there to rot, but are intended to be reused in other cities or at least properly recycled. The market for rental vehicles is becoming more and more regulated in China, which should prevent a massive oversupply in the future.

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