I work on computers and often have people just abandon their property, both repaired and unrepaired, with me. I now make people sign a form requiring pickup or partial payment within 14 days but in the past I would just sit on them a while and then send them to the recycler or resell the repaired units. I was paying to store these equipment at a considerable cost once and now no longer do that. I basically made the people who called me back like 6 month later pay the entire storage fee. This made them mad but weren’t really customers I wanted back anyway. Now I have them sign the form which has solved lots of problems before they can start.
I was at the local shop I use once and he had a truck sitting outside. He mentioned that the guy had left it there 6 months and wouldn’t call back. I think he was in the process of getting legal ownership of the vehicle so that he could remove the good parts and scrap the rest. It had a bad transmission and good engine. Someone was chomping at the bit to buy the engine from him. I am sure dealing with cars is a lot more of a pain than computers since they are hard to move if they don’t run, have legal titles, and there is a legal time limit before considering them abandoned in most places.
I am sure it is usually old clunkers that get left behind. This is the way it is with computers. The cheap door busters from Wal-Mart are the ones I get left with most often. The general idea with these is to pull the decent parts and send the rest off for proper recycling. I have actually ended up with a few nicer Core i3, i5, and i7 units being left behind but those are rare. There seems to be a definite correlation between crappy computers and a crappy owner and I am sure it is exactly the same way with cars.