Mercedes, Jaguars among more than 300 scrapped cars

MORE THAN 300 cars abandoned in Dublin city last year were scrapped after their owners failed to claim them, according to Dublin City Council.

The council said a variety of vehicles of various ages were abandoned every year and included vintage models and high-specification cars such as Mercedes and Jaguars. Some cars abandoned last year were registered as recently as 2005 and 2006.

The council’s abandoned vehicles officer Martin Farrell said some cars were foreign-registered and perhaps had been abandoned if their owners had left Ireland to return home. Owners may also have been afraid to claim them if they had not paid the relevant duties upon importation.

They might also fear the cost of retrieving the car from the pound would exceed its value, particularly if the vehicle had broken down. The towing charge is €150, followed by a €30 a day charge for storage at the pound in north Co Dublin. However, Mr Farrell said people should not be deterred by those figures as charges were decided on a case-by-case basis.

He said the removal of abandoned vehicles was not a money-making exercise but was done to enforce the regulations relating to waste management.

He said the council’s abandoned vehicles section got more than 50 calls a week from people reporting abandoned cars but, upon investigation, about half of those cars were not abandoned.

The council did all it could to alert the owner before the car was impounded. Once owners were notified, some 70 per cent of cars were removed.

If they were not removed, the cars were towed to a compound. About half of those cars were claimed and the remainder were scrapped after being “depolluted”. This involved removing pollutants such as the air-bags and engine oil. Some 321 such vehicles were scrapped up to December 7th last year – a considerable reduction on 2009, when 736 were scrapped.

Mr Farrell said the number of cars being abandoned had fallen in recent years because of new legislation on end-of-life vehicles.

This allowed owners of intact end-of-life cars and vans to deposit them for free at authorised treatment facilities.

The introduction of the scrappage scheme also reduced the number of vehicles being abandoned, he said.