Car Dismantling Robot: From Scrap Yards to ABB Robots

About 12 to 15 million vehicles reach the end of their useful life each year in the United States alone. Taking them apart by hand, with wrenches, drills and forklifts, is still common before the bare shell goes into a shredder. A car dismantling robot would take over part of that work and remove parts and materials cleanly enough for them to go back into new cars. This post looks at scrap yards and shredders, the EU rules that began in 2000 and the new regulation that took effect in August, Japan's push for automated dismantling, and where ABB robots could fit.

Two technicians remove parts from an end-of-life car with power tools at the Toyota Circular Factory in Burnaston. Photo: Toyota

From wrecking yards to the EU's end-of-life rules

Car dismantling grew up in wrecking yards, also called auto dismantling yards. A photo of a Sydney car wreckers' yard taken on 26 July 1940 shows rows of old cars, bare chassis frames and loose wheels. The routine has changed little since. Staff take an inventory of usable parts, remove the wheels, tyres, battery and catalytic converter, drain the fluids, and sell high-value parts such as electronic modules, alternators and engines. Hazardous items come out next, including the mercury switches fitted to some vehicles before the 2003 model year. Self-service "You Pull It" yards even let customers remove the parts themselves at a lower price.

A car wreckers' yard in Sydney on 26 July 1940, with old cars, bare chassis frames and loose wheels. Photo: State Library of New South Wales via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

What is left goes to a crusher or shredder. Yards flatten or bale the bodies, and a hammer mill then smashes them into fist-sized chunks so that the metal can be separated from glass, plastic and rubber. A photograph in the US National Archives from April 1973 shows flattened cars stacked at an auto shredder on Fields Point, waiting to be turned into scrap metal for export. The shredder took whatever a yard could not sell, and in Europe lawmakers eventually decided to regulate what happens to a car before it gets there.

Flattened cars stacked at an auto shredder on Fields Point, waiting to become scrap metal for export, April 1973. Photo: Hope Alexander, US National Archives via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The European Commission proposed an end-of-life vehicles directive in 1997, and the European Parliament and Council adopted it in September 2000. It guarantees that owners can hand in an old car free of charge at an authorised treatment facility, where it is first depolluted and then dismantled before the shell is shredded. By Renault's count, almost 94 percent of the mass of end-of-life vehicles in the EU is now reused or recovered, and France reached 96.7 percent in 2023. The gaps remain large, though. A 2018 Commission study found that the whereabouts of 3 to 4 million end-of-life vehicles a year were unknown.

Cars stacked on steel racks at a scrapyard in England in 2007, so that usable parts can be found and removed more easily. Photo: Snowmanradio / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

New EU rules, Toyota's circular factory and Japan's robots

The EU End-of-Life Vehicles Regulation entered into force on 13 August 2026, replacing the directive after almost 26 years. Once a car is classed as an end-of-life vehicle it may no longer be exported or resold as second-hand, vehicles become easier to trace, and manufacturers take on more of the cost and work of collection and dismantling. Renault's circular economy unit, The Future Is NEUTRAL, handled the collection and dismantling of more than 400,000 end-of-life vehicles in 2025. The supplier association CLEPA says a pre-shredding layer, where parts are removed for reuse, is still missing.

A forklift carries an end-of-life car across the yard of the Toyota Circular Factory at Burnaston in Derbyshire. Photo: Toyota

At Toyota's first Circular Factory, a pilot at its Burnaston plant in Derbyshire since summer 2025, the work is done by hand. Trained technicians deploy the airbags, remove fluids and gases, and then dismantle each car with Toyota Production System methods run in reverse. Aluminium from recovered alloy wheels went into engine parts at Deeside, and the first new Corolla built with them left the line on 19 March 2026. In Japan, the BlueRebirth council formed by DENSO, Honda, Toray and others in June 2025 is working on automated precision dismantling, where AI and sensors guide robots along the best path even on deformed parts, with a goal of recovering more than 90 percent of each vehicle by weight.

A technician drains fluids from a raised end-of-life car at the Toyota Circular Factory in Burnaston. Photo: Toyota

We found no ABB robot dismantling cars, so this part is a possibility. ABB's closest real work is in electronics: with the US start-up Molg it builds robotic microfactories that take apart laptops, servers and industrial electronics, and its venture arm invested in Molg's seed round. Our post on e-waste recycling and disassembly covers that work. A car needs bigger arms and stronger tools than a server rack, and ABB's larger robots, such as the IRB 6700, already lift large panels in other factories. Unbolting seats, wheels or dashboards from cars of every age and condition is the problem BlueRebirth is working on.

Two ABB robots on top of a Molg robotic microfactory built to take apart data center hardware. Photo: ABB

Where car dismantling robots go next

BlueRebirth's members expect their automated system to handle more than one million vehicles a year. The council's president, DENSO's chief technology officer Hirotsugu Takeuchi, says future cars must be designed with recycling in mind from the start, and Toyota feeds what its circular factory learns back into product development. Takeuchi also expected Japan's Resource Collection Incentive System, due to start in April 2026, to push the use of recycled material further. A cell that removes parts from a line of different models would most likely be planned and tested in RobotStudio first, with a 3D model of each car.

An ABB IRB 6700 lifts a large solar panel for a folding roof at dhp technology. Photo: ABB

Drivers mostly meet these rules when they hand in a car. Since 2024, carmakers in France have had to organise free collection of complete vehicles of their brands, and Renault customers can book it online through Indra's Goodbye-Car platform, which also takes other brands. Parts in good condition go back to garages as checked, tracked reused parts that usually cost less than new ones. What cannot be reused still ends in a shredder, and our post on scrap metal sorting follows the metal from there.

A technician handles a removed dashboard assembly beside green sorting bins at the Toyota Circular Factory. Photo: Toyota

Variety is the first open problem. Auto Recycling World, reporting on BlueRebirth, notes that manual dismantling remains common because vehicles differ so much in model and condition, and a robot has to cope with deformed parts as well as clean ones. Electric cars need special handling: in Belgium, only about 10 of the more than 100 facilities in the Febelauto network are certified to take electric end-of-life vehicles. People are the third issue. A Danish project worth about DKK 55 million, running from 2026 to 2028, expects that more thorough dismantling will need more people to sort and prepare materials, and it wants some of those jobs to go to unskilled workers and people on the margins of the labour market.

ABB robots taking apart server hardware in a Molg microfactory. Photo: ABB

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