Cash for clunkers...

Anyone planning to trade their car/truck in for a new one under this program?

oh how i feel shivers down my spine when i hear of these programs..

people destroying good usable cars. no cars for future generations to tinker with.

to me its eco friendlier to use existing old cars instead of getting a new car that has to be made from scratch.

"Cash for clunkers"... SERIOUS misnomer!! There's no cash involved at all! You get a voucher for your "clunker". And the amount of the voucher is dependant upon the gas mileage of your "clunker" and the gas mileage of the new car you have to buy with the voucher.

HERE is a very good article regarding the program.

And here is the "meat" of the program:

1. Trade in a car that — this is a key point — has been registered and in use for at least a year, and has a federal combined city/highway fuel-economy rating of 18 or fewer miles per gallon.
2. Buy a new car, priced at $45,000 or less and rated at least 4 mpg better than the old one (gets a $3,500 voucher). If the new one gets at least 10 mpg better, you get the full $4,500.
Example: Trade that well-worn 1985 Chevrolet Impala V-8 police special, rated 14 mpg, for a 2009 Impala V-8 rated 19 mpg and the government will kick in $3,500. Downsize to Chevy Cobalt (27 mpg) or even a larger Honda Accord (24 mpg) and get $4,500.

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I came across an article earlier.
It has synopsis of the European, American, Canadian and British Columbian versions.
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNe...OS_cash_clunkers_090619/20090619?s_name=Autos

You guys got it good compared to Canada.
Quote "Ottawa is offering $300 in the form of bus passes, bicycles or cash to the owners of pre-1996 vehicles who junk their rides."

People in British Columbia get a better deal.
Quote "the payouts are based on the size of the greenhouse gas benefit. That is, the worst polluters are worth the most to owners who scrap them.
If your old car, when scrapped, offers a fairly low greenhouse gas reduction, then you get $750 applied to the purchase of a new vehicle. Medium benefit, $1,250 and high greenhouse gas benefit, $2,250."

I remember a few year back they had a program for clunker that didnt pass CA smog, I received a check from the Fed Gov for 2500.00. If lucky I could have sold the car for 500. I great way for tax money to be spent, leave it to the fed's.

Where's a program so we can get a voucher for our "clunker" Luxeon lights for newer Cree or Seoul type lights? Say if it went from 50 lumens to 100 lumens with more efficiency? Think of the batteries we could save! Or if the light was pre 2000? Or we could apply for a "modders" voucher, so we could send our lights off to Milky or whomever to get them upgraded? Dang Congress, what were they thinking?

My thoughts are the manufactures are the one who will benefit most. They will stop offering incentives...dealers too. So it will cost anyone who does not have a clunker more. And those with a clunker might not see any real gain... And of course the tax payer "you...we...us" will pay the price all the way around.

That said, it will be worth looking into. I have a 2000 S-10 truck that I might let go of for a new one. Trade in value is only $2200 (130,000 mi). It looks great, runs great...love it. But if the deal is good enough...she`s scrap yard bound.

I have an old minivan that I would like to trade for a small car, can it be done? or does it have to be another minivan?

So what's the catch? Will they include the incentive as taxable income at the end of the year?

AlexGT

Sounds to me that most vehicles turned in under this program will be trucks, vans, and muscle cars. Older vehicles are safer as they are made of solid metal instead of tin foil. Trading in a van for a smaller vehicle will require two cars to transport larger families. That doesn't help reduce pollution and probably doesn't help keep families together either. Trucks are needed for many jobs, and with U.S. car companies starting to go bankrupt, it will soon be harder to get a new truck. Do these old cars go to the junkyard where they can be purchased, are they made into spare parts, or are they being destroyed? If they're destroyed, it isn't going to make U.S. car owners happy as the car parts industry is in trouble and used parts may be their only option to fix up their car, especially for car brands that are no longer being made.

Seems to me that this is yet another way to use our money to take away our choices. Want a cheap, used car? Too bad. They've been destroyed. Need parts to fix up your older car? Too bad. The company no longer makes parts for it since the brand went out of business and the used cars that had the needed parts were all destroyed. I guess you'll have to buy a new little clown car that gets 100 miles a gallon that only seats one third of your family and can't haul any cargo. At least it will be good for the environment to retire large cars to the dumps before they stop working. Not. It means an entire car has to be made early to replace the old one and landfills will fill up at an accelerated rate. At least it will reduce the amount of "poisonous" CO2 in the air and help fight global warming. Not. Manufacturing a new car to replace the old car will cause pollution which will include pollutants far worse than CO2. If you think you can stop global warming by reducing CO2, hold your breath. At least you'll know how the plants will feel if there is no more CO2.

If it hasn't been made clear already, I believe in a free market economy. I know what I need better than a beauracrat and am against anything that takes away my choices. I'll decide what doctor I want, what car I buy, how much money I'm willing to earn, what lightbulbs I use in my home, what type of knives to buy, what battery chemistry I use in my flashlights, and I don't mind being a pain in the butt to anyone who tries to take away my choices. Taking away your freedom of choice is the same as being forced to do something. Once you're left will only one option, it's not a choice, it's an order. It's like boiling a frog slowly versus putting the frog in boiling water. If you put the frog in boiling water, he'll hop out. If you raise the temperature slowly with the frog in the water, he'll get cooked to death. That seems to be the strategy here. Take away our options slowly, one at a time, and nobody will notice until we have no options and our freedoms are gone.

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NO way ........

I'm not interested .
.

It's painfully obvious that the people running the States and Country don't want you to drive, nor do they want you to have teh personal choice as to what you drive and use for tranportation.

They'll say it will help the environment, which is crap, it will only help THEM and their agenda.

Personally, I think this type of governmental intervention into personal choice and personal responsibility has got to stop. But, not many in the general populace care; too infatuated with that certain head-honcho who's swatting at flies on the evening news.

You'd figure they'd have made it so it had to be a Chevy, in order to back up the bailouts. Still, I wouldn't scoff at 4,500. I sure as heck need a new car.

Greta said:

"Cash for clunkers"... SERIOUS misnomer!! There's no cash involved at all! You get a voucher for your "clunker". And the amount of the voucher is dependant upon the gas mileage of your "clunker" and the gas mileage of the new car you have to buy with the voucher.

HERE is a very good article regarding the program.

And here is the "meat" of the program:

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Sweet Jesus, I actually have a clunker that is exactly 18 mpg combined!!! I almost traded it in on a new Honda Accord last fall, but they would only give me $800 for it. Now this is change I can believe in. This keeps up and I may have to change party affiliations. WooHoo!

It probably makes more sense to give an incentive to convert large gas guzzlers to either plug-in hybrids, or better yet straight electrics, than to crush them, at least according to this article.

If you replace your current large or small internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle with a new PHEV of the same size, it will take over 40,000 miles of driving the PHEV in place of the old vehicle to save as much energy and CO2 emissions as was consumed in the manufacture of the new vehicle! If instead you convert your existing vehicle into a PHEV, you will need to drive only 8,600 miles before beginning to save more energy and CO2 emissions than caused by the conversion process.

This is because it requires as much energy as is contained in 1,822 gallons of gasoline* to manufacture a new mid-sized PHEV PSV (Pickup truck, SUV, or Van), but only the equivalent of 360 gallons -- 1/5 as much -- to convert an existing PSV into a PHEV. For a Prius-sized passenger car, the numbers are 1,035 and 196 gallons respectively.

* burned at 100% efficiency, not the 12-15% efficiency of ordinary ICE vehicles

If you consider only oil consumption, rather than total energy use and CO2 emissions, the savings begin significantly sooner. It's almost immediate for conversions: after 8,000 miles for a new PHEV and only 1,600 miles for a conversion.

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One thing the study didn't take into account is what happens if the new vehicle is shaped more aerodynamically so that it's inherently more efficient. It may take 40,000 miles before you get a return if you make a PHEV SUV of the exact same size and shape. But what if the new vehicle is just as large (and therefore useful to its owner), but instead has a highly aerodynamic sloped front? I'd guess the return period would be a lot shorter.

Of course, there are other good reasons for getting very large vehicles off the roads which have nothing to do with energy consumption but that has nothing to do with the topic of this thread.

dano said:

It's painfully obvious that the people running the States and Country don't want you to drive, nor do they want you to have teh personal choice as to what you drive and use for tranportation.

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For a whole bunch of reasons, most of them economic believe it or not, it actually makes sense to have a policy which encourages people to use either public transit, walking, cycling, or some combination of these three. The annual death toll from auto use is horrific. The number of people who get cancer from transportation emissions is even higher. Pollution ruins structures and otherwise negatively affects quality of life. Roads and parking lots use valuable real estate which could otherwise be put to better uses. All of these things cost tons of money. Over most distances cars aren't even any faster than well-designed alternatives (just ask any NYer if it's faster driving or taking the subway when going into Manhattan). Therefore, you can't even say that the money spent on the other things is more than paid for by time savings for the car users. But for now we're unfortunately stuck with what we have. People don't drive because it's better, they drive because in most areas they simply have no reasonable alternatives. Even if we made it a national goal to build a public transit system better than Europe's (and we could), it would be at least a generation before we finished. So all we can do for now is try to make the auto less polluting. But I tend to agree that this policy is the wrong way to go about it. The car bodies already exist. Rather than crush them it makes more sense to convert them unless they've already exceeded a reasonable service life (say 15 years).

Maybe if the government is so gung ho on getting people out of their cars they should give an annual monetary incentive to those who don't own one, or even more to those without a driver's license who can't even drive a borrowed car. Granted, such a policy won't make a bit of difference in most of the US, but it might cut down significantly on auto use in areas where viable alternatives already exist. Hey, just a thought.

Let's not forget here what the true purpose of this program is... to help out the auto industry. This really has nothing whatsoever to do with getting Americans to drive more fuel efficient vehicles and the whole carbon footprint thing.

So how about this? The car companies need a bail out. They need to get rid of current inventory that is piling up and collecting dust. They need funds to keep their companies running and people employed. Many consumers need new cars. New, more effcient cars wouldn't be a bad thing but let's not discriminate. So instead of just handing over money to the car companies or coming up with spiffy little "programs", let's give anyone who buys a vehicle from one of the companies with their hand out to the government an automatic $5-10k knocked off the sticker (depending on the total cost of the vehicle which will be $1 over invoice and no more). The consumer gets a low interest loan on the balance. The amount that gets knocked off the top is paid by the government. This would be in lieu of the funds handed over as a bail out. The inventory gets lowered, consumers get new vehicles they can afford, people keep their jobs, the auto industry has to actually WORK for their hand out. It's win-win for everyone!

I think the whole idea is silly and just wanted to state for the record that Ford has yet to ask for a bailout/takeover.

Greta said:

Let's not forget here what the true purpose of this program is... to help out the auto industry. This really has nothing whatsoever to do with getting Americans to drive more fuel efficient vehicles and the whole carbon footprint thing.

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I don't remember the program requiring that you had to purchase an American car. What's to keep us from buying a Toyota or a Honda? These are the two top fuel efficient car companies, but they are Japanese companies. Those hybrid batteries are all made in Japan or China. The truth is that we don't have much of a U.S. car industry anymore. Most things nowadays only say assembled in the U.S.A. instead of made in the U.S.A. Most parts are made oversees. This program will help other countries just as much, if not more than ours. It is simply a waste of our money. It doesn't help the environment, it doesn't help create jobs in the U.S., and it attempts to manipulate our purchasing decisions by incentivising us with our own money while eliminating our lower cost options.

Does not need to be an American car...or a car with hi gas milage. Your clunker needs to get an EPA rating of 18mpg or less...and you must have owned it/insured it for at least one year. Here is some info http://cashforclunkersfacts.com/bill-faq

I have my eye on a 2010 Camaro...v6....304hp...Yea baby! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtQj6ZnMwBE

So those of us who have made sensible choices (buying cars with good EPA mileage) get nothing-- and the people that have had to buy giant Oldsmobuicks at "You Get Credit Auto" and can't afford a new car (read: the working poor) can't take advantage of it, as even a $4500 voucher towards a $14,000 car probably won't help out all that much. I don't think very many people will actually be able to take advantage of this at all.

However, I *have* heard car ads for the Nissan Versa for $9999 -- there might be some people lucky enough to make use of the voucher in a case like that and get a real bargain.

Hooked on Fenix said:

I don't remember the program requiring that you had to purchase an American car. What's to keep us from buying a Toyota or a Honda?

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EXACTLY!! And this is why my plan above would work out so well for OUR economy!!

Alaric Darconville said:

So those of us who have made sensible choices (buying cars with good EPA mileage) get nothing-- and the people that have had to buy giant Oldsmobuicks at "You Get Credit Auto" and can't afford a new car (read: the working poor) can't take advantage of it, as even a $4500 voucher towards a $14,000 car probably won't help out all that much. I don't think very many people will actually be able to take advantage of this at all.

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BINGO!! And there, my friends, is the fatal flaw in the program!