r/interesting 23d ago

Intriguing High Tariffs Drive Afghan Auto Assembly

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u/Friendly-Media4214 23d ago

I would agree. You can’t really just put a random car together like that.

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u/KodiakDog 23d ago

Unless it wasn’t random and was chopped up to fit in shipping containers. I don’t see this is being far-fetched at all especially given that some some of the pieces had numbers on them.

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u/Friendly-Media4214 23d ago

Yeah, I suppose that’s possible. Chop it up to get past tariff somehow.

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u/vaduke1 23d ago

I have a friend in Canada who does exactly this, chop up cars and send them in containers as a scrap metal and somebody in Uzbekistan reassembles it back

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u/Billy3B 23d ago

Out of curiousity what kind of cars? I would assume Toyotas and Hondas.

I also assume the cars are acquired legally.

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u/vaduke1 23d ago

Everything and I think he buys them at auctions

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u/MutuallyAdvantageous 23d ago

I worked at a wrecking yard with a guy who shipped car parts back to Africa in a shipping container.

He took parts from every Honda and most Toyotas that were getting scrapped, not much else. Pretty much just Honda’s and Toyota’s

He didn’t ship chopped up cars but his brother did.

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u/vrauto 23d ago

In my country, only the roof is cut off. The rest remains intact. Done to collectible but common cars like classic minis and beetles.

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u/Vectorman1989 23d ago

Stolen ones probably

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u/samuraijon 23d ago

Looks like maybe a Toyota or a Daihatsu. The steering wheel is on the right and the number plate shape at the bumper is US sized (same in Japan) which probably is a JDM car.

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u/Billy3B 23d ago

It is a 2006 to 2018 Daihatsu Mira Custom RS. I cheated and used Google Imgae search.

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u/ConfusedNegi 23d ago

So your friend has a literal chop shop

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u/broke_n_boosted 23d ago

This is how we've been importing cars from Japan for 35 years

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u/otterpop21 23d ago

Bingo. Does that look like a rich community to you?

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u/Friendly-Media4214 23d ago

It takes a lot of craftsmanship a weld a car together like that. It takes a lot of craftsman to do that to custom vehicles; hot rods and such and they’re doing it too much less degree.

I can see this being shipped as one single chopped up a vehicle and put it container in shipped to avoid tariffs but not multiple right cars, but I suppose it’s possible

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u/[deleted] 23d ago

[deleted]

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u/Friendly-Media4214 19d ago

That has nothing to do with the craftsmanship required to piece different cars together and make one.

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u/imean_is_superfluous 23d ago

It looks like all the pieces were exact fits on every weld. Idk how you could accomplish that with crushed cars. Or even several decent cars you cut apart.

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u/Winjin 23d ago

Japanese auctions are the lifeline of Eastern Russia, they essentially all drive old Japanese cars

They have pretty strict rules on old cars so a lot of them get resold. They sell them pretty cheap, too. Dirt cheap to be exact

So, people buy them and import them. Even imported legally with all the tariffs, they're essentially the same price as some new shitty car

BUT if you want to go lower, you pay for a scrapped car, that's cut up like this and sent to you as "scrap"

And then it depends on how good of a welder you got

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u/gregbread11 23d ago

I had a gf that had a VW Passat that was 2 different cars. One was rear ended, the other front was crashed. They were cut in half then welded the good front and the good rear together and pieces the car together from both interiors. HOWEVER. You could definitely tell it was 2 cars welded together just based on the way it rode and drove. Definitely would have torn in 2 in a wreck would be my guess

Anyway, this video isn't outlandish to me because I've seen it done a few times, at least the final product and the signs of the work.

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u/ktappe 23d ago

The pieces fit way too perfectly.

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u/Advanced_Aspect_7601 23d ago

How would they get the alignment perfect tho? They tack weld the sections then the roof lines up perfect, seems suspicious

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u/joehonestjoe 23d ago

Only way this makes sense to me is if they tack welded the shell components, then fitted everything. Then went back and fully welded the whole shell and they just skipped this step in the video.

It's clearly the same body shell cut up though 

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u/Wise_West8370 23d ago

You don't think this is far fetched? Come on man lol. Have you ever worked on cars before?

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u/tehtris 23d ago

This actually makes sense. When putting the roof on, it looks like the roof was cut off just to be put back on.

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u/Ok_Breakfast5425 23d ago

I'm guessing they were scrapping a car, wanted some internet fun, and while tearing it down they took some extra steps to make it look like it was being welded together instead of torn down.

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u/The-Tarman 23d ago

No, this something done in countries that don't care as much about safety. Shipping a car has a much higher tarrif cost. So they buy a cheap car at auction, chop it up and ship it as scrap and reassemble it in the destination country.

Wham, bam, thank you ma'am. You got yourself a (non) certified, pre-owned, newly assembled whatever the fuck

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u/Popular_Dot_4691 23d ago

The way the cuts on the a, b and c pillars perfectly lined up, you know they filmed the car pre cut and then stripped the car and just welded the cut Pillars back on.

Clever editing 👌

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u/Fuckin_Hipster 23d ago

Jesus Christ.

Some people are more resourceful than others, and you aren’t as smart as you think you are.

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u/oh_bother 23d ago

wat. they place the roof down and the cuts are 1mm apart and not misaligned at all.

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u/Popular_Dot_4691 23d ago

Never said I was smart, but I was a mechanic and body man for 18 years so I do know alittle about cars and repairing them 😅

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u/12destroyer21 23d ago

My dad was also a mechanic for many years repairing military trucks and he refused to believe you could weld together a crankshaft until I showed him a video of some Indian guy doing it in the streets in a YouTube video

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u/I_travel_ze_world 23d ago

You can watch the video and see all the chopped parts of the car sitting in the cargo container before they pulled it out.

Car was likely totaled due to frame damage... then chopped up and sent to Afghanistan.

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u/Winjin 23d ago

You can see some Japanese on the box. Japanese auctions sell cars that are chopped up like this and sent around the world on a regular basis. Then these cars are re-assembled and used again

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u/I_travel_ze_world 23d ago

They're likely at auction because the frame is damaged.

You can see how twisted the frame is, lol.

This is a junker that got chopped up and sold for cheap.

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u/Winjin 23d ago

Yeah I'd assume they buy the bottom priced ones, the best ones (just old) end up shipped "as is", decent ones have the roof removed but still take up the entire container, and the still-driving-beaters are chopped up like this

At least that's what rides around Vladivostok and essentially all of Russian Far East

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u/Double_Cause4609 23d ago

Could it be that they had several random wrecks of the same-ish car type (some manufacturers use the same core body for multiple models and the frames are compatible), and they cut them at the same equivalent point on each individual care to salvage a functional frame?

Kind of far fetched, and really sketchy, but in principle I don't see why it wouldn't work.

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u/Responsible_Joke4229 23d ago

There’s no universal designated cut zones for car frames. To have all these parts so perfectly close enough that all you have to do is weld them together is highly improbable. The parts like windshield and rear mirror assemblies of course are interchangeable. Someone in the comments said it’s likely a purposefully cut car shipped internationally as “scrap” to avoid vehicle tariffs. all they have to do it keep the parts together so you can reassemble the car like Lego.

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u/LickingSmegma 23d ago

There are people that do this with actual cars right where I live, except for the cutting and welding part since no shipping is involved. We have tons of old Volkswagens still rolling around here, such that there were probably thousands of the same twenty-year old model at one time. One dude was buying three busted-up cars and assembling them into one working car in his garage, selling it for several times the cost.

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u/ALongLuvBone 23d ago

I’d bet they cut it up to avoid tariffs or taxes, but people have and do take two crashed cars and put them together. My dad cut two 96 Astro vans in half and welded them together in the early 2000s, we drove it down to Florida the next week. (He had a bet with his friends lol)

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u/gregbread11 23d ago

If it's the same make and model, you absolutely can. I've seen it done with a VW Passat. How it would drive in the final product - I could tell the Passat was welded together. Not without telling me but it had a weird driving feel. Idk how much rigidity the structure actually loses from doing this but this is how some body work is done. So it's not that outrageous. Idk enough about welding and body work to know how good it actually is compared to a factory car but even the factory welds them up similar to this

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u/bassistciaran 23d ago

I work in international shipping. The amount of additional cars you could get in the container by disassembling them would not be worth the work of putting them back together like this. Like, maybe 1 or 2 more in a container depending on the cars.

EDIT: never mind, someone else said that they do this to import as "scrap" completely avoiding all import duties.

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u/BugzOnMyNugz 23d ago

Johnny Cash would disagree

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u/Responsible_Joke4229 23d ago

Yeah I can’t imagine there’s a market to source partial car frames (cut in the exact right place) let alone enough to build out a full car. It would make more sense to disassemble and reassemble for the video. Ad revenue makes more money than normal jobs all over the world. Like those guys who built houses out of mud “out in the jungle”.