the 99 DeVille ( || www.tgnagy.com || ) I dragged to the dealer for my III on August 27 has finally disappeared from the dealer lot. R.I.P DeVille, you served me well.
I hope this 99 caddy is not the one that hit my wife in the rear. I now have two perfect hexagonal holes in my rear bumper of my prius.
That (I hope) is an atypical Clunker. Unless the Caddy had very serious mechanical issues, sure looks as if it would have been a great buy for folks needing a larger used vehicle. This was one of the side-issues of the C4C program. Many perfectly good used cars were crushed that may have been wonderful for lower-income folks. And these lower-income folks may be continuing to drive very polluting older vehicles. And now that 600K or so 'clunkers' are off the road -and used car lots- supply is down so used car prices will rise, especially those under $8K or so. So folks looking for <$10K cars will find lower invertory and higher prices. And many of these perfectly good used (clunker) cars may have gotten only 2MPG less than the new vehicle purchased to replace it. Don't want to get into this contreversial issue as there have been threads on this - but that car of yours sure looked sweet.
In my mind CFC never was for "clunkers". The term clunker to me conjures up images of a 30 year old rust bucket that doesn't run. Turns out the govt thinks clunkers means a vehicle (25 years old or NEWER) that only gets slightly worse fuel economy than what you're buying. It seems like an incredible waste to take tons of great running vehicles and crush/disable them when it's better to REUSE. Think: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. The easiest form of those is to reuse the car, let someone else have it. Reducing or Recycling is using much more energy and time.... :-(
Wasn't the point of CFC is to provide an incentive for people to buy a new car, thus stimulating the new car market? Like you said, I don't think it was meant to take old cars off the road
C4C was only about giving away tax payers money. I'm so glad my tax payers bought other people vehicles. You know, instead of important things like food or education.
I went to the back of the Toyota lot where they kept all their clunker trade ins and it did seem a waste. Some of the cars appeared to be in decent enough shape so somebody would be able to use them.
Have an idea for another C4C program. How about we trade in our old Clunker political representatives in D.C. Clean out those rusty models that have clogged up Congress and other government functions in Washington. You know - those officials that exhaust huge amounts of stale hot air, polluting the country, and are costing the taxpayers more and more every year to support them. Replace them with new models with fresh ideas, no rust, run cleaner, more reliable, and require less maintenance. Now, the old models need to be rendered unfit for further use under law. They cannot be recycled into other roles in Federal or State/Local government functions. The traded-in models must be totally scrapped. Let's enact the Cash 4 Crooks program. We, the country's owners will be better off in the long run.
that's what it looked like a while back. It was leaking oil, clear started peeling where part was respayed, I backed into something, forget what, but whatever I hit won, rear air-leveler was heading south, 146k miles, well worn interior (no rips, tho), it was time, and the exhaust was shot. Had a blue book value of $1,800. Sorry if anyone is offended by people utilizing the C4C program, but I see it no different that subsidized state and local education, state parks, roads,and the like.
We traded my Dad's old '89 Caddy de Ville (a real clunker) for our 2010 Prius series III, and not only got C4C rebate, but also Air Check Texas one too. Was great getting a 2010 for the price of a used 2005. We had to buy it in an Austin Suburb as the local dealers in Austin either didn't honor the rebate programs, or jacked-up the price with "packs" beyond the A.C.T. max. car price. We just barely got the C4C rebate as cars.gov showed 18 avg. MPG for the Caddy. The best we ever got was 16 on highway. We love the new Prius... 47.5 real MPG on 2500 mile trip to TN. though displayed MPG was 49.7. My biggest disappointment so far is the poor rear window visibility, its wiper not clearing 1/3 of what I can see through, and the FM radio not displaying text. We also experienced the backup braking issue of not being able to do so smoothly.
CFC program achived 9.2MPG average, a 58% improvement. 84% of trade ins are trucks and SUVs, top being the ford explorer which literally started the SUV boom. 59% of new vehicles purchased are fuel efficient cars. Imagine number of cars sold x 58% improvement in fuel econony x mileage driven = many millions of barels of crud oil we don't have to import. I don't have the exact number but it was pretty significant. And factory is recalling thusands of layed off workers back and increasing productions. And imaging how much tax revenue these new car sales has generated to the goverment? Sales tax, registration, income tax from sales person, dealer owner, truck driver, and domestic car manufacturer and their workers... you name it. Not to mention the increase in share value of GM and Chrysler. Remember you all bought shares of these company with your tax dollar? Yeah, I am sure some nice cars got crushed alone the way but I believe mostly these clunkers were truely gas hog trucks and SUVs. I believe it was the best $3 billion we spent out of hundreds of billion dollars we spent to stimulate this economy.
