President Obama talked of building the economy from the bottom up but they are doing the opposite. They take our money and give it to the banks and we are supposed to go borrow it AND pay interest.

Also, while I’m suspect of the whole idea, I’m fine with destroying the cars. They’re stripped for parts first, and they’re basically crap. If a car gets less that 19 mpg, I don’t car how much you like used cars, it would be foolish to purchase one. I highly doubt anyone is trading in something awesome like a Gran Taurino or anything that could have actual resale value. Plus the parts from crushing become building material, sold by an American company, which pays American taxes on their profits, so there is that boon. But having only a 4 mpg difference is pretty stupid.

Supercars should last 30+ years and be reparable for the life of the owner.

People who buy non-Supercars should have to pay a “National Debt Reduction Fee” of $5000 when they buy their choice and $10,000 when they buy a Hummer, a totally wasteful vehicle.

As someone that has been shopping for a good used car for my 16yr old son, I hate to see the pictures on the news of all those good used cars being destroyed.

What a waste.

1st The government could use truck freight fees to offset costs and divert moneys to repair / upgrade the rail system.

2nd Lower the size and weight on trailers to use more drivers (jobs) to haul road freight. Makes the highways $afer too.

3rd Limit all truck drivers to an 8 hr shift total, including load times and provide incentives to use the rail freight and stop with the highway projects that widen intersections as large as Wal-Mart parking lots.

There’s a better way of doing all this; we just have to figure it out.

I agree that companies that took our tax dollars and government bailout should be held to a very high standard. I won’t hold my breath.

We’ve been in the new car biz associated with Ford for about 25 years now. I wish I could say more, but I can’t…Ford has some absolutely amazing innovations in the works right now. Watch for it.

I would have gone into more, but I really didn’t have time to research the program in full detail. Much like my MonaVie article, something seemed really a miss and few people seemed to be speaking out against it.

As for Fords, I have owned one since 2001. As for the Ford Fusion Hybrid, I don’t see the plugin option that the Chevy Volt will have. Now, I don’t know if it’s really more efficient to plug in your car (electricity has to be generated by something, right? – unless you live on solar power), but it seems like experts think that is more efficient.

I guess I feel that the companies that took government money have more responsibility to do something useful with it. :-)

Why do people continue to ignore the one company that didn’t take one dime of government/tax payer money, yet wait longingly for GM and Chrysler to make the miracle vehicle?

Come on now…the government owns GM and Chrysler….they’re gonna make what Big Brother tells them to from now on.

LazyMan, your post doesn’t begin to touch on the complicated nature of this entire program.

The dealers and the employees themselves have so many hurdles to jump through, massive paperwork to fill out, approvals to get from phone numbers that just ring or are terminally busy, and had to attend webinars and classes to understand and be in compliance with the federal regulations imposed on the dealers and upper management. It is not so cut and dried about which vehicles are eligible for trade. And the dealers are on the hook to the federal government tune of enough money to buy a good car if they make one mistake on an ineligible trade, or on the paperwork. And believe you me, the paperwork is less than clear and very complicated.

Think on this:

Not only is the program ineffective at doing much if anything for the environment, car manufacturers have spent much money on advertising and hyping the Clunkers program….only to have the government that desires to bury our economy end the program within 5 days of it beginning. What’s the motivation there?

At which point, dealers realized that the government didn’t even create a way to track the money that was used, the right hand had no idea what the left hand was doing, probably still doesn’t. They can’t run a basic incentive program, the likes of which car manufacturers have been running successfully themselves for many many years, and they want to run health care? What a crock.

Here’s another main point to consider.
And it is one that should make people pay attention to what is going on in our country. Things are being done with the appearance of helping, but the intention of hurting.

If you take all new car sales in the US (prior to the economy taking a dive) and divided them up, they total more than $1Billion a week. That’s right, prior to the economy being sabotaged, new car sales in the US were topping $1Billion dollars a week in the US. And the government expects us to believe they are going to stimulate our economy until November by infusing car sales with a $1Billion dollar incentive???? The money lasted all of 5 days…which shows you, that again, either complete morons are trying to “help” the economy or they have other intentions entirely while trying to make it look like they are “stimulating” the economy.

Who does the math for the government?

And this is just the tip of the iceberg with the clunkers program. There is so much red tape on each deal you can’t believe it.

Color me beyond disgusted.

So in this case the government either took money away from a repair shop that would have repaired the car or paid the dealer to sell you a car you were going to buy anyway. The net result is money out of the economy

The idea was supposed to be to sell more fuel efficient cars, but that’s a laugh. Truck & SUV sales are up (since gas prices are down) and Toyota closed it’s Prius plant before it even opened.

At the risk of tooting my own horn, I posted on this subject this morning. See http://newfromclt.blogspot.com/

And why destroy a perfectly good engine? I hear that they run some sort of chemical through the engine that completely wrecks it. Couldn’t you at least scrap it and resell the parts? Or why can’t the cars be resold or auctioned off to people who have no car so that they can get to work, be productive, and add value back to the economy?

Anyway, I heard that a lot of dealerships I getting hung out to dry on this since the government may not have enough money left in the program to reimburse them. So, if the federal government can’t do something that is essentially a glorified promotion, how much confidence do you have in them to run our health care?

My van technically ran. Just barely and not well, and a new transmission would have cost close to 2K plus labor, I could not justify trying to keep it going any longer, as it is my main transportation for my family.