I remember last year when a pair of crooked Chinese entrepreneurs were discovered to have run off with a number of million dollars worth of cash which they 'stole' from the Chinese government.
Apparently they were making cars and selling them to a car hire company which they owned. Seems the Chinese government were subsidising EVs above the retail price, but only when sold. The story was that EVs are registered by VIN and battery serial numbers, and they were replacing the battery's serial number as they couldn't obtain new batteries, and they were putting the same batteries in different cars. It all came to light when a bean-counter in the government decided there hadn't been enough metals available to build the batteries. Bearing in mind that some of these batteries had been sitting around for years, I would have to wonder what became of them. Over a million cars were found, without batteries, scattered across China, and at least 100,000 batteries had been manufactured.
Sorry if this seems a bit 'foggy', but I can't remember exact details, nor can I find the original article I read.
