- cross-posted to:
- climate@slrpnk.net
- cross-posted to:
- climate@slrpnk.net
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Give me a $28k EV that seats 4 full size adults comfortably, has around a 300 mile range and throw-in a $6k credit to have a charging station installed at my driveway.
It is now affordable.
I will die on the hill that it is more environmentally conscious to keep a old, DECENTLY efficient, used vehicle (10-15 year old Camry, Corolla, accord, etc etc, so yes this excludes your 20 year old yukon) on the road, over manufacturing a BRAND NEW EV that will be junked in 10 years.
Why?
Cash for clunkers scheme destroyed the used car market.
In my country they increased taxes on ice cars (new , as well as part of insurance is ice engine tax , and there is a co2 tax on petrol/diesel). Together with small EV incentives the EV gets cheaper especially when driving a lot or looking at the longer TCO (inspection, service, running costs)
I know cash for clunkers wasn’t a big hit with a lot people, but it wasn’t unlimited. Didn’t it too out at $4,500 and wasn’t that a bit tiered? What idiot wouldn’t have taken their car to somewhere like Carmax for a quote. Or a dealer actually look up the KBB price of a car before scrapping it? If it was worth more than the credit, it would have been silly to put it in the program. Now, I also remember people towing in non running POS’s and getting the credit, so that was a wash.
Sure, it took some used cars off the road, but I think it was the very bottom tier anyway. If you were in the rust belt, that car didn’t have much life left in it anyway.
Eric Hartman, a retired pilot in Lakewood, Colorado, junked his 2003 diesel Volkswagen Jetta in September in exchange for a rebate on a new Hyundai Kona electric. To qualify, the car needed to be more than 12 years old or have failed an emissions test.
The problem with these programs is that they are not restricted enough.
My own ICE would technically qualify for this, since it’s 14 years old now. But there is literally nothing about it that makes it a “clunker”… It’s in great mechanical condition, I get 32 MPG in most highway conditions, it’s a cool enthusiast type car, it fits my needs… Why would I even consider sending it to the scrapyard?
And this vagueness means that, technically, a 2011 Toyota Corolla (or similar) could qualify. A Corolla is far and away one of the most reliable vehicles on the road, ICE or otherwise. It’s a car that a lower-income individual can just pay for with cash and drive it for many more years with minimal fuss. And yet, to benefit those buying new, it technically is allowed to be scrapped, removing it from the market.
The sentiment is good but the types of vehicles that qualify need to be restricted to trucks, SUVs, and larger cars.
I really disagree. Emissions requirements have generally gotten tighter over time, older cars will mostly pollute more than new cars because of components that fail over time. Their mileage has gotten worse too. We don’t have a problem with too many people trading in their old cars for an ev. We have too few of these. If you make it too complicated people will shy away from it.
Until we are running out of money for this trade-in strategy, let’s keep it up.
I own a 2006 Corolla and it’s insanely reliable, although it’s showing its age already. The government here offers a 12K$ voucher for it if I will buy an electric car, but I still can’t let it go even though I kinda want a new car.
Damn sick deal tho. That+fed tax credit you could get a bolt for very cheap.
Exactly, that guy’s 2003 diesel Jetta probably got 35-40 mpg and pollutes far less than any truck or SUV.
hahahahaha no. They pollute quite a bit more, especially since that’s pre-stricter emissions standards that came into effect here in 2006.
Diesels have disproportionate impacts on local air quality too, a major driver of asthma and respiratory illnesses.
FWIW I’ve owned all generations of small VW diesels since MY2001. Most recently had a Touraeg that was unfixable for emissions.
The main thing these cash for clunkers schemes do is drive up the 2nd hand market by creating artificial scarcity.
Manufacturers love this shit because coming off the back of supply issues, they can go back to pushing up demand for new vehicles all over again.
It’s also a scheme that helps people that are already able to afford a new car - people shopping the 2nd hand market aren’t going to be helped, so it’s really not effective as a societal benefit - it just helps people who likely were already shopping for a new car get a slightly more expensive one.
Not to mention that the emissions it took to produce the EV still need to be offset, so the polluting vehicle makes sense to keep depending on how often they drive.
It looks good on paper to be able to say, “we took another ICE vehicle off the road”, when realistically it makes no sense.
Not to mention that the emissions it took to produce the EV still need to be offset,
I saw an article posted on here within the last few weeks that an EV beats a new gas car on emissions by ~15k miles driven. In other words, the break even point for a normal commuter’s driving requirements is about 12-18 months.
You’re looking at a few years of driving an ICE before you’re behind a new EV plus driving the same distance. That makes it better for the environment to replace an ice now with a BEV, because you’ll be contributing less to emissions in about 18 months or so.
Speaking only about co2: due to how ICE produce their emissions (less grey, more on use) vs how BEV do it (more grey emissions, less on use), it is always effective to scrap (=recycle) the ICE as soon as you can and replace it with a BEV.
It is never worth it to keep driving the ICE until it fails, their emissions at manufacturing are just too low compared to what they produce afterwards while being driven.
It is not intuitive, but it is logical when considering the global emissions of cars.
Trees need CO2 to live. Stop cutting the trees.
Don’t buy ICE that fails. Toyota doesn’t fail. Guy in Florida drove Highlander over 1 million miles but it got destroyed in hurricane so Toyota gave him brand new one. Otherwise he still be driving the old one.
IF EV battery fails it will cost an arm and a leg to fix it assuming it can be fixed. Exploding it with a dynamite works too. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
And this is exactly why Cash for Clunkers was a failure in every way except for giving a massive handout to the auto industry. Studies showed it had no impact on emissions, or even new sales. All it did was pull ahead existing sales by a few months to a few years.
I’ve got an rx8 that gets 12-14mpg and requires oil injection. Should it qualify?
The standard to qualify apparently require the vehicle to be scrapped to have an EPA MPG rating of 18 or less. So your 30+ MPG car wouldn’t qualify.
Keeping old poluting cars on the road polutes less than producing New Low/zero poluting cars.
This is stymulus disguised as an Eco policy.
This is only true in the short term. A new EV will emit fewer total lifecycle emissions, including those produced during manufacturing, after just 20-30k miles on the road. Thats 2-3 years for the average American driver. After that, that old clunker continues to emit more than an EV that would replace it.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-21-misleading-myths-about-electric-vehicles/
I’ll give you 33 TRILLION reasons we should not be doing this.
Cash for Clunkers did an excellent job at keeping poor people off the road, while enabling rich people to get a Lexus hybrid more cheaply. Furthermore, many of the cars scrapped were no more than 7–8 years old and in excellent condition. A perfect testament to how wasteful public spendings can be.
LOL
I’m not saying C4C was a great program - it was kind of a crappy stimulus - but how do you figure either of those things? Most of what was traded in was pretty run of the mill 90s cars.
- 1995-2003 Ford Explorer/Mercury Mountaineer: 46,676
- 1996-2000 Chrysler/Dodge/Plymouth minivans: 23,998
- 1993-1998 Jeep Grand Cherokee: 20,844
- 1992-1997 Ford F-150: 20,222
- 1984-2001 Jeep Cherokee: 18,329
- 1988-2002 GM C/K pickup: 17,202
- 1995-2005 Chevrolet Blazer: 15,668
- 1999-2003 Ford Windstar: 12,157
- 1991-1994 Ford Explorer: 11,612
- 1994-2001 Dodge Ram 1500: 8,103
That list is almost one in three of the Clunkered cars. Many of them were 10-15 years old. And at the same time new car sales were absolutely bombing so there were millions of cars not being made. The under 700k cars from C4C didn’t have the same impact on used prices as the millions of cars we didn’t make 15 years ago which would now be at the bottom end of the used market.
While it also got rid of some clunkers, an eight year old RAM or a four year old Blazer will typically have many fine years left. Same with a six year old Explorer. Many cars were worth maybe 6–7K, while the rich owner scrapped it to avoid the hassle of selling it.
You can look at your own list, it quite plainly shows trade-ins for such vehicles as the Toyota Supra, Mitsubishi 3000GT, and even the aforementioned 2006 A4 Cabriolet Quattro example. I even spot a 2008 Ford Mustang. Some of these vehicles are historically significant, and in many cases donor parts could/should have been used to extend the life of other cars on the road. For the most part, these kinds of cars also tend not to be daily drivers, which means they’d have had insignificant emissions impact.
In regards to supply: While the OEMs weren’t technically at fault for the drop-off in car sales circa-2008, it also wasn’t the government’s job to use taxpayer money to subsidize new sales. That taxpayer money could have gone to social programs and housing development at a time when millions were literally homeless. There are many folks who at that time would have been very happy to possess a running Jeep Cherokee because they had no other options — C4C did not help those people. It’s classic broken window fallacy stuff.
Toyota Supra
About 300 of them
Mitsubishi 3000GT
2 of them.
and even the aforementioned 2006 A4 Cabriolet Quattro
1 of them.
C4C was bad for specific reasons, but the paranoia of “zomg! think of all the classic cars that got smashed” is debunked nonsense.
For the most part,
For the most part, the cars that got turned in and junked were run-of-the-mill cars.
Not debating any of that, nor does it really counter the assertion that C4C was ineffectual in how qualifications were set for the program. It was a lazy program, badly managed, to little actual positive effect.
I could be a little off with the timing, but didn’t Nissan introduce the $10K Versa around the Cash for Clunkers era.
They did that in the great recession, yet here we are again.
We are going to get rid of perfectly operational vehicles to have them replaced with new EV? That is a waste of resources. I would give an analogy, but there are not many that make sense. Maybe that would be like not wanting people to drink alcohol so you buy all of, ban it, only for new variants of alcohol products to be made? Basically you have to produce more carbon collecting materials, manufacturing the parts, assembling, and transporting the new vehicles. Also what if a natural alternative comes around in the not too distant future? The government getting in the way of advancement by incentivizing a flawed system will only set all of society back years.
How about we only let companies make 10% profit on EVs and outlaw dealer price gouging? OEMs need to turn in the exact cost of their productionp to the government and they can only sell the vehicle for 10% more than what it costs to produce. These greedy assholes are making 30% profit margins which comes out of your pockets. Capitalism only serves to incentivize greed over our health and the planet. We need course correction.
Now obviously everyone having their own little metal box to get around in is a really bad use of resources so that will have to be dealt with in the long term by building public transit infrastructure and moving away from car centric city design but in the short term we are going to have to reign in the worst aspects of capitalism.
I was wondering how long it would take for the “Fuck Cars” crowd to get here.
In reality, we can have both. Much of Europe proves this fact.
10% profits would increase the costs of all EVs except for Tesla.
It’s capitalism - someone taking a risk and investing capital to develop a production scale EV that made electric vehicles possible/practical to build in the first place. Now the fact that capitalist turned out to be a grade A douchebag is another matter.
They already do this in my state. $5,000 for any ICE over 10 years old when you buy an EV
I’m not trading in my old Volvo wagon simply because there isn’t an affordable EV wagon for me to buy in the USA
cash 4 clunkers is back!? man i been waiting for this… i got a bunch of old ones saved up this time
Fuck yeah Cash 4 Clunkers all over again!
/s