Final destination: One car's end-of-life journey to the scrapheap

Pics taken, I started the Zafira for the last time and we headed out of the graveyard to its final destination: ASM Auto Recycling, near Thame. ASM is one of the country’s busiest and most advanced vehicle recyclers, processing hundreds of end-of-life vehicles every week, auctioning write-offs to the repair industry and stripping, checking and reselling used parts to the trade and the public.

On arrival, our first stop was the company’s prepping centre. Here, cars are cleared of personal effects and anything that might cause a fire. ASM’s prep team showed me a van whose floor was littered with spent nitrous-oxide cartridges… Less dangerous personal effects are bagged up and held for six months awaiting possible collection by their owners. They filled one wall of the prepping centre. Among them were child car seats and buggies.

The Zafira’s personal effects extended only to a novelty strawberry dangling from the rear-view mirror, so the prep team waved it through to the next stage – but not under its own steam. Instead, a forklift approached it from the side, picked it up and carried it down the hall to Paul, who set about lowering its windows for the final time – “so the glass doesn’t explode when it’s grabbed outside” – and removing the fuel cap, wheels and battery. Behind him were bins full of wheel nuts, alternators, air-con compressors, space-saver spares and even jump leads, all harvested from scrapped vehicles.

Now the Zafira was ready for its date with Simon, elsewhere in the prep centre, who attached its vitals to a large suction pump that drained them of all fluids. To empty the fuel tank, he perforated it with what looked like a large, hollow drill and the fuel was sucked out through a hose attached to its side. Finally, he tapped off the brake discs and the Zafira was ready for the crusher.

Outside, a pair of mechanical grabbers, each controlled by a skilled operative, were flinging end-of-life cars around as if they were Corgi models they’d grown tired of. We watched, appalled, as our Zafira was offered to them. The first swooped on it, picked it up, dropped it and nudged it over. The car was by now almost unrecognisable and ready for the attentions of the second, which plunged its snout through the roof and ripped out the dashboard complete with trailing wiring loom. Then it turned the car over and tore off the back axle. Flipping the car around, it now spied the engine. Its pincers deftly snipped through the mountings and hoses and lifted it out, depositing it on a pile in the corner of the yard.

The other grabber now took over, picking up the car by an A-pillar before raising its steel stabilisers and rolling over to the crusher into which it placed the Zafira’s battered carcass. The crusher’s huge doors closed and, 30 seconds later, opened to allow the grabber to retrieve the former MPV, now a tangled bale of compressed steel, seats and interior trim. During the course of a single day, this trio of mechanical manglers rips, tears and crushes its way through 125 cars.