Inside the huge facility where Audi strips down thousands of expensive cars that are in an almost-new condition

There’s a facility where some seemingly brand-new Audi vehicles are stripped down, ‘destroyed’, and then repurposed.

It sounds bad, and wrong, but there are some logical reasons behind this.

As you can imagine, there are both legal and environmental factors at play.

And also something else that has to do with the car historical value.

Why is Audi ‘destroying’ expensive cars?

Audi teamed up with several companies for an initiative called MaterialLoop, designed to recycle materials, especially metal.

With MaterialLoop, Audi is trying to work out a way to recover 100 percent of materials from cars that have reached the ‘end of their cycle’.

In our minds, ‘end of their cycle’ sounds definitive.

We tend to associate it with a vehicle being totaled in an accident.

In reality, end of cycle sometimes simply means the car has outlasted its purpose which, in some cases, is something that happens while the car is still usable.

Many of the expensive cars we see here are pre-production prototypes and mules that are now worthy of a museum, and are not street-legal.

This is how it works

For MaterialLoop, the German manufacturer partnered with 15 companies to create the perfect ‘loop’ to recycle these materials.

After removing all fluids, Audi removes other components like batteries, engines, wiring, and so on.

At that point, there are four main materials you can recycle: steel, glass, aluminum, and plastic

All four can be can be reused with relative ease, and that’s why these cars are ‘ruthlessly’ disassembled.

But we should also point out that there are some exceptions.

The cars that end up being recycled are often generic, everyday vehicles.

Put simply, an Audi A5 or a Q5 prototype may end up here, but an Audi R8 prototype is more likely to end up in a museum.