The Mazda situation is an odd one. I can see their difficultly that they can't guarantee the cars as safe; okay, the cars weren't designed to hang by their wheels or whatever, fair game. So it becomes a destruction and insurance job.

It's sad that they couldn't recover the non-critical parts for re-use. My suspicion is that this was due to the insurance claim, i.e. the whole car has to be written off. The article does state that the wheel slicing was to satisfy the insurance by preventing any part of the written-off car being recovered and sold.

At least the metal is going for recycling rather than landfill.