Re: the below, I think they should give up by now. — Dan

When you think of a desert, the image in your head probably contains a lot of sand and… well, not much else. Maybe there’s some vegetation here or there, a snake or vulture darting cross the landscape, and maybe even the ruins of an old mining operation. Wait long enough, and you’ll probably come across a car or two.

But you wouldn’t expect to see this.

The image above is the winner of National Geographic’s 2018 photo contest. It shows a parking lot containing hundreds of thousands of cars (and one plane!), all of them sitting in neat rows, baking under the sun. They’re about a 90 minutes northwest from Los Angeles (here’s a map), but the cars there aren’t going to LA — or anywhere else — any time soon. They’re relegated to sit there and do nothing, much like they have for over a decade.

Their story begins in 2015, when Volkswagen got caught in one of the largest corporate scandals in automotive history. The German automaker had been selling diesel vehicles marketed as clean and fuel-efficient, but as the Guardian reported, the company had rigged nearly 600,000 of those vehicles to cheat on emissions tests. The cars were equipped with special software — so-called "defeat devices" — that could detect when an emissions test was being conducted and temporarily reduce the car's pollution output. The rest of the time, the vehicles spewed pollutants at levels far exceeding legal limits.

The fallout was enormous. Volkswagen faced up to $20 billion in Clean Air Act fines alone, and the Federal Trade Commission sued the company for deceptive advertising. As part of the settlement, VW was required to either fix the affected vehicles or buy them back from their owners. Many owners chose the buyback, and according to NPR, by the end of 2017, Volkswagen had reacquired about 335,000 diesel vehicles, spending more than $7.4 billion in the process. The company was only able to get rid of about 30,000 — that left roughly 300,000 vehicles with nowhere to go.

So Volkswagen did what any company with nearly a third of a million unsellable cars would do: it went shopping for parking lots. The automaker leased space at 37 remote facilities across the country, including a former football stadium in suburban Detroit, an old paper mill in Minnesota, and — most famously — a 134-acre patch of land at the Southern California Logistics Airport in Victorville, pictured partially above. That facility was already well-known as an "aircraft boneyard," a desert purgatory where retired airplanes go to collect dust. Now it had a new purpose: storing diesel Volkswagens and Audis while the company figured out what to do with them.

The Mojave was chosen, in part, because its arid climate would prevent the cars from rusting. A VW spokeswoman told Reuters that the vehicles were "being stored on an interim basis and routinely maintained in a manner to ensure their long-term operability and quality, so that they may be returned to commerce or exported once U.S. regulators approve appropriate emissions modifications." That was in 2018. Even years later, most of those cars are still sitting there, waiting for a fate that may never come.

Today, the company — having already paid billions of dollars to buy back cars it can't sell — is paying to store them indefinitely in the desert, maintaining them just in case they might someday be allowed back on the road. It's the world's most expensive parking lot, and the meter is still running.

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Today’s Bonus fact: In 2007, a well-dressed man walked into a Porsche dealership in Malaysia, asked to test drive a $280,000 car, and then “sped off, smashing through the glass windows, as Reuters reported. He had successfully stolen the car. But he didn’t plan well — the car’s gas take was low and he quickly ran out of fuel, so he abandoned the car by the side of the road. But his caper wasn’t quite over. Authorities towed the car to a local police precinct and, sometime later, the their — who still had the keys — returned with a canister of gasoline, refilled the tank, and stole it again. (He’d ultimately abandon the car again, as police set up roadblocks in hopes of capturing him, but he was never identified or arrested.)

From the Archives: Quickly Going Nowhere: Why a lot of very expensive cars are being abandoned in Dubai.

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And thanks! — Dan