Tens of millions of used vehicles are destroyed per year in Europe by hammer shredding. However, the quality of the fragments in terms of composition (presence of copper essentially) is not sufficient for their efficient recycling. This difficulty is presented in the first part of the paper in which attempts to improve the scrap quality by a simple separation based on size are described. In the second part, lab-scale experiments, designed to have a better understanding of the phenomena taking place in the shredder, have been performed on model steel products such as cans. The fragments have been analyzed from the point of view of their size, morphology and metallographic distributions. A deformation scheme can be proposed for the cans.