After Tet Nguyen dan 2024, vehicle impound lots and confiscated items in Ho Chi Minh City are overloaded due to vehicle owners not coming to reclaim their vehicles.
Tens of thousands of vehicles including motorcycles, trucks, cars, and three-wheeled vehicles violating traffic rules are temporarily impounded and piled up in various impound lots.
Outside the storage area, tens of thousands of vehicles are stacked tightly in multiple rows. The vehicles are piled up to a height of 5 – 6m around the walls.
At the confiscated vehicle impound lot of Binh Tan District Police located near the intersection of Ho Van Long – Vo Tran Chi (Tan Tao Ward), thousands of vehicles including three-wheeled vehicles and trucks are covered in dust.
With an area of about 3,500m2, the confiscated vehicle impound lot of Binh Tan District Police is nearly full.
At the largest confiscated traffic violation impound lot of the Road and Rail Traffic Police Department (PC08) in Le Minh Xuan Commune (Binh Chanh District), over 17,000 motorized vehicles including motorcycles and cars have been piled up for many years.
Currently, the PC08 impound lot with a roof is overloaded and there is no more space. The authorities have to move many vehicles outside and pile them up into a “mountain”.
The motorcycles are closely parked together. These are vehicles temporarily impounded for violating the Road Traffic Law, but the owners have not come to pay fines and reclaim their vehicles.
Major Le Manh Ha – Deputy Chief of Staff of Ho Chi Minh City Police, said that since 2023, the traffic police have conducted multiple crackdowns on alcohol violations, resulting in an increase in impounded vehicles.
According to Major Le Manh Ha, due to the relatively high fines for these violations, sometimes higher than the value of the violated vehicles, and the additional penalty of driver’s license suspension, many violators have abandoned their impounded vehicles, leading to an increase in the number of impounded vehicles in storage yards. PC08 department alone lacks 10,000m2 of storage space to accommodate impounded vehicles.
