For a long time, cars written off in North America have found their way to Eastern European repair shops willing to take on damage that US and Canadian mechanics won’t touch. In 2021, the most recent data available, Ukraine was a top-three destination for used US passenger vehicles sent overseas, close behind Nigeria and the United Arab Emirates. And Ukraine’s wreck importers and repairers are particularly known for their ingenuity. Some have made fixing EVs written off across the Atlantic into a specialty, helping to drive a surge in the number of electric vehicles on the country’s roads, even as the war with Russia rages.
Though few automakers sell new EVs in Ukraine, the share of newly registered vehicles that are fully electric, 9 percent, is about the same as in the US and nearly double that of neighboring Poland and the Czech Republic. Most of Ukraine’s refurbished EVs come from North America, and many arrive with major damage.
There’s a ready supply of crashed North American EVs in part because electrics are becoming more common, and also because in recent years, relatively new EVs with low mileage have been written off at a higher rate than their gas-powered equivalents, according to data from insurers. US and Canadian repair shops and insurers see them as more dangerous and difficult to fix. Scrapyards find it hard to make money from their parts and instead ship them abroad.
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The war has even boosted Ukraine’s EV resurrection business at times, by driving up gas prices and making electrics more attractive to drivers. Ukraine has a public charging network of some 11,000 chargers, according to Volodymyr Ivanov, the head of communications at Nissan Motor Ukraine—that’s more than the state of New York, and double the number in neighboring Poland. Since 2018, Ukraine’s government has removed most taxes and customs duties on used EV imports. In the US, electric vehicles tend to be expensive, and the average EV driver is still a high-income male homeowner. North American wrecks, Ukraine’s EV incentives, and its relatively low electricity prices have created a different picture.
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Industry-wide data is hard to come by, but numerous sources suggest that EVs are more likely to be written off than gas-powered cars, and can be declared unfixable after even minor crashes. A Reuters analysis this year found that a “large portion” of damaged EVs sold for scrap were low-mileage, nearly-new vehicles. While one in 10 new cars sold in the US and Canada this year are forecasted to be electric, the infrastructure and expertise needed to assess and fix damaged EVs can be patchy. “In an ideal world, electric vehicles are as easy to repair as internal combustion engine vehicles,” says Mark Fry, research manager at Thatcham Research, which crunches auto market data for insurers and other clients. It recently found British EVs get written off at disproportionately high rates.
The main reason EV repairs are so tricky comes down to a lack of agreement on how to handle EV batteries after a crash. Worldwide, there is no industry standard for measuring battery health. Vehicle manufacturers sometimes refuse to sanction battery repairs because of liability concerns. “If you repair the battery, what's it going to be like after another two, three years and another 50,000 miles?” Fry says. It’s easier to let nearly new vehicles be declared dead than to find out.
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