Dumping of Cars

From the 1978 period when I arrived in the Rhein Main area....through the 1990s, while in the military....one of the more interesting episodes that I noted in Germany....was the 'dumping' of cars.

The script usually went this way.  A guy would go out and buy X-car for $500 to $1,000 (anything but a winner).  Some of these cars would actually last two or three years.  Some became maintenance 'hogs' where you dumped $4,000 into the vehicle over a one-year period.  These were cars to get you just around the local community....they weren't supposed to be a vehicle that you'd drive six-hundred miles to the Oktoberfest and back. 

Guys would reach a stage where they were fed up.  Rather than go down to the base/post vehicle 'yard' and some $25 fee to salvage the vehicle.....they'd just go and drop it off somewhere.

At the Rhein Main base terminal, you had hundreds of episodes over the decades where a guy wrapped up his tour, and just left the car there in some parking lot as they left.  A lot of folks would just drive the car into some underground parking lot, and walk away (taking the plates).

I asked about this once, and some base cop remarked that it wasn't just Americans that did this.....Germans were also prone to dumping cars.

I noticed today in the HR (regional public TV network) that they hyped up this problem of Germans dumping cars.

In Darmstadt, they've reported 755 vehicles in the past year that were towed as abandoned cars.  You typically get a 'point' on your driving record, and a minimum of 60 Euro fine.

In Giessen, they towed 66 vehicles last year, with the normal fine being a hundred Euro.

In Frankfurt, their fine system ranges from 120 to 500 Euro, depending on the value of the car.  They hauled away around 2,100 cars in 2017.  You can figure that's in the neighborhood of six cars a day that they come across as abandoned.

No one says what the national number is, but I would take a guess that it's in the 100,000 to 125,000 range of cars just being 'dumped' on the street each year.