US policymakers are rolling out big incentives for electric vehicle buyers who surrender a gas-powered model, advancing efforts to cancel carbon emissions.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
About 300 of them
2 of them.
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, 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.
LOL