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A deadline looms for businesses to glean usable parts from hundreds of automobiles. Last summer's Cash for Clunkers program has clogged auto salvage yards with a glut of trade-ins that are too damaged to drive but too good to be sent directly to scrap. The less glamorous side of the auto industry is having trouble digesting the byproducts of the buying frenzy that put nearly 700,000 new automobiles on the nation's roads -- and took the same number off. The future of millions of usable auto parts is in limbo as a critical deadline looms this winter under the federal...

SNL Bashes Obama, Stimulus, Healthcare and Cash for Clunkers By Noel Sheppard Created 2009-11-22 10:38 NBC's "Saturday Night Live" really went after President Obama in its opening sketch Saturday evening. Not only that, his policies involving economic stimulus, healthcare reform, and Cash for Clunkers were also exposed as having absolutely no positive or future impact on unemployment. The setup was Obama, played by Fred Armisen, doing a press conference with Chinese President Hu Jintao, played by Bill Hader. As Jintao, through interpreter played by Nasim Pedrad, realized how much money the United States owes China, he questioned how we were...

WASHINGTON – Billed as a way for the government to put more fuel-efficient vehicles on highways, the popular $3 billion Cash for Clunkers program mostly involved swaps of old Ford or Chevrolet pickups for new ones that got only marginally better gas mileage, according to an analysis of new federal data by The Associated Press. The single most common swap — which occurred more than 8,200 times — involved Ford F150 pickup owners who took advantage of a government rebate to trade their old trucks for new Ford F150s

SANTA MONICA, Calif. — October 29, 2009 — Today the Department of Transportation and White House chose to respond to an analysis Edmunds.com released Wednesday that looked at auto sales this year and what sales volumes would have been had the popular Cash for Clunkers program never existed. At issue is one point of the analysis showing the taxpayer cost for every incremental vehicle sold was $24,000. To be clear, Edmunds.com is not disputing the government's statements regarding total voucher applications, vehicles sold or voucher values. The key question is how many of these sales would have occurred anyway. Apparently,...

Last night we were shocked to see that The White House was using its blog to tear into car website Edmunds.com over some analysis it did of Cash-For-Clunkers. To recap: Edmunds.com says the program was a gigantic waste with little effect. The White House disagrees. Anyway, Edmunds is sticking by its analysis, and it put out the following press release: SANTA MONICA, Calif. — October 29, 2009 — Today the Department of Transportation and White House chose to respond to an analysis Edmunds.com released Wednesday that looked at auto sales this year and what sales volumes would have been had...

It is an odd, and we'd say regrettable, pattern of this White House that it lets itself get dragged down into fights with specific media outlets. George W. Bush experienced acrimony with the New York Times, but for the most part, other than general frustrations of a conservative administration, complaining about a liberal media, it was no big deal. But in addition to Fox News, now The White House is going after highly-respected and influential car site Edmunds .com. They're actually using The White House blog to dispute the site's analysis of Cash-For-Clunkers (via Detroit News). The post is snarkily...

The Obama White House has apparently decided to wage a two-front war on the media. After a blistering analysis of the Cash for Clunkers program from the well-established auto industry analyst Edmunds, the White House tried attacking their credibility while claiming that automakers were planning for greatly-increased demand for their new products. Business Insider wondered what the administration could be thinking: On the same day that we found out that motor vehicle output added 1.7% to economic growth in the third quarter – the largest contribution to quarterly growth in over a decade – Edmunds.com has released a faulty analysis...

White House fights back on Cash for Clunkers Obama administration goes to battle with Edmunds.com on Cash for Clunkers analysis, saying the program contributed heavily to last quarter's economic expansion. By David Goldman, CNNMoney.com staff writer Last Updated: October 29, 2009: 5:51 PM ET NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The Obama administration on Thursday lashed out at a prominent critic of its Cash for Clunkers program, arguing that the popular trade-in initiative helped give the auto industry and the economy a much needed boost in the past few months. In a blog post on whitehouse.gov, the administration argued that a report...

Nothing’s Over: The Top Reason GDP Does Not Show Recovery By Rocky Vega 10/29/09 Stockholm, Sweden – In order to juice the US into recovery the economy has been stimulated all over the place. The mainstream media is wild with cheerleading that the 3.5 percent third quarter GDP growth is a sign that the day is saved. Is it? No. The single clearest reason the GDP figure is hugely misleading is the Cash for Clunkers program. That particular government hand out caused motor vehicle output to spike almost 160 percent when compared to last quarter. That’s easily the highest quarter...

It is an odd, and we'd say regrettable, pattern of this White House that it lets itself get dragged down into fights with specific media outlets. George W. Bush experienced acrimony with the New York Times, but for the most part, other than general frustrations of a conservative administration, complaining about a liberal media, it was no big deal. But in addition to Fox News, now The White House is going after highly-respected and influential car site Edmunds.com. They're actually using The White House blog to dispute the site's analysis of Cash-For-Clunkers (via Detroit News). The post is snarkily titled:...

There is little doubt that Cash for Clunkers gave auto sales a big boost in late July and most of August, but there has been considerable debate as to how much help taxpayers' $3 billion provided. Customers who purchased a new car or truck were rewarded in many ways, especially when you consider the U.S. government paid out a median price of about $4,000 per clunker. Those customers are also saving at the pump, as each car turned in was 4-10 mpg better than the vehicle it replaced. Dealers sold more cars. States received more tax dollars. So the program...

American taxpayers paid a lot of cash for those clunkers: $24,000 for each new car sold, according to a study released Wednesday. The government could have done almost as well by just giving away cars for free, instead of creating an elaborate incentive program, according to an analysis by the automotive information firm Edmunds.com in Santa Monica, Calif. ... to look at how many people purchased cars that otherwise wouldn’t have been bought. The firm says that number is about 125,000 cars. By that measure, the government spent $24,000 to generate each sale of a new car. In all, the...

I don't want to sound negative, but is anyone else getting the idea that we're starting to live in Clunker Nation? Start with the actual clunker deal where we borrowed money from China to buy Japanese cars in order to save Detroit. Nuts! All told, we spent $2.88 billion in money we didn't have in order to smash 690,114 cars, according to the final numbers from the Department of Transportation. What pulled up to be demolished were mainly Americ

SO...you took FEDZILLA up on its offer of $4500. dollars to trade in your old "Clunker" (interesting choice of words)? Well, let's see who got the best of that "deal"... If you traded in a clunker worth $3500, you got $4500 off for an apparent "savings" of $1000. You could have gotten $3,500 if you had just traded the car in. So you really are $1,000 ahead (depending on your clunker's value) at this point. Not too bad.... However, you WILL have to pay taxes on the $4500 come April 15th (something that no auto dealer will tell you). If...

One of Washington's all-time dumb ideas. Remember "cash for clunkers," the program that subsidized Americans to the tune of nearly $3 billion to buy a new car and destroy an old one? Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood declared in August that, "This is the one stimulus program that seems to be working better than just about any other program." If that's true, heaven help the other programs. Last week U.S. automakers reported that new car sales for September, the first month since the clunker program expired, sank by 25% from a year earlier. Sales at GM and Chrysler fell by 45%...

What goes up must fall just as hard. Case in point: cash for clunkers: "The dramatic decline in sales reported Thursday by the Big Three automakers suggested the extent to which the stimulus act has propped up the economy. The government’s wildly popular “Cash for Clunkers” program drove consumer spending to its highest level in eight years in August. But after it ended, so did the growth in auto sales. General Motors’ sales plunged 36 percent in September compared with August. Ford plummeted 37 percent. Chrysler dove 33 percent. Cash for clunkers “was a one-time boost of sales followed by...

Spending soars to highest in eight years on 'clunkers' Real disposable incomes off 0.2%, marking third monthly decline in a row By Rex Nutting, MarketWatch WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- Spurred by government subsidies to buy cars, U.S. consumer spending soared 1.3% in August, the fastest increase since the post-Sept. 11 shopping binge of eight years ago, the Commerce Department estimated Thursday. Spending on durable goods rose 5.3% in August as auto sales surged on the government's "cash-for-clunkers" program. The clunkers program accounted for most of the increase, the government said. The program, intended to get motorists to trade in older vehicles...

the list of all 690,114 trade-ins.

Not a JOKE! Someone thought it was a Good idea to trade in these two rare vehicles in the Cash 4 Clunkers program... Jalopnik has a list of the ten most exotic cars that were scrapped in Cash-For-Clunkers. A Bentley Continental R worth $307,000 and an Excalibur Autos Phaeton. Only 1,290 of these Bentleys were built. Now one has been destroyed. Click on the pictures below to see the rest.

The automotive-information Web site Edmunds.com said it expects seasonally adjusted sales in September will be the worst of 2009, down 3 percent vs. February — "the darkest month of the recession" — and down 30 percent vs. last September "when the bottom was falling out of the economy." Dropping with the sales are the profits of dealers, who this month have had to goose incentives even as they carry hundreds of millions in debt as they wait for the government to make good on its Clunker vouchers. "The best month of the year for car sales is being quickly followed...