Posted on 04/20/2020 9:54:28 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
CEO Jim Hackett said
"I took delivery of a GT500 during the snow season, and I was able to drive it this weekend. It was such a relief from everything. My wife and I went on a really long ride together. It turned a lot of heads because you can hear this vehicle coming."Just wait until Gretchen gets wind of this!
The only wind Gretchen hears is blowing out of her fat stupid mouth.
And the first program back in 2009 worked so well ... /s
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/cash_for_clunkers_evaluation_paper_gayer.pdf
Who buys used cars? Poorer people, students, people just starting out. This became a HUGE tax on the poor because the SUPPLY of used cars they purchase dried up.
Correct. I did not take advantage of the last C4C scam. As I didn't own a clunker.
I own one now. My daughter's car. A 2008 Vibe with 250,000 miles on it. If C4C comes back, I may take advantage of it. I don't need a new car. But why the hell not? Car makers are slashing prices AND offereing 0.00% financing for 72 months.
It's like Free Money.
But as you say...It will harm poor people the most. As it did in 2008.
If I thought this was a go, I’d swing down the street and nab a used car for under $3000, *any* used car that I thought would qualify....
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Nope. IIRC, in 2008 the rule was you had to have owned your clunker for at least a year.
To deter this very kind of activity.
Had I known, I probably could have gotten a better deal than the $10k+ I got off on the truck I bought back in September. And my 2016 truck probably won’t qualify. Besides, at 50k miles, it still runs great.
I guess I'll just keep driving mine.
My brother and I shared an 1942 Olds Coupe that got 100 miles per quart of oil. After a while, we didn’t even check the dip stick, just dumped in a quart of $.25 oil. Yes, we bought “Valor” oil for 25 cents. I would fill up a milk bottle from a 50 gallon drum of “bulk oil,” from the Texico station where I worked. The year was 1957! LOL
That one would really move out!
The only people I know who took the deal were over 70 (they were living in sin, but it wasn't all that sinful) and had two POS vehicles. They wound up with some high fuel economy roller skate, but they didn't travel anywhere anyway.
Horrible.
Raises the cost of a car for the working poor, who can least afford it.
And no great ecological saving in constructing a whole new car in place of one that used a little too much gas.
Your old Olds must have been reincarnated as our kids’ old VW 2002 Jetta. At about 80k miles, we just routinely dumped a quart of oil in at every gasoline fill-up. Sometimes it took 1.5 quarts if it was off the bottom of the stick.
I used to buy oil in the paper containers with the metal lid in Missouri around 1970 for $0.25. You’d push in that piercing spout and your hands would always smell of oil afterward. Today’s youngsters with the plastic oil “cans” and the screw-off cap — sheesh, they don’t know how good they have it! Of course, who has to add a quarter of oil between changes these days anyway?
As the price of new vehicles soared in the past decade, many of us (including me) who were not “poor” or a “student” or “just starting out”, bought used cars simply to avoid the mark-up of new vehicles simply for being new.
In fact, for many it is smarter to buy a vehicle 2-3 years old with low mileage over something new because you’d be getting practically everything a new car could provide for maybe 60-70% of the cost.
None of this negates your main point which was that the “Cash For Clunkers” idea disproportionately harmed those unable to afford new cars.
That’s been our strategy, too. Usually a two or three year old car isn’t a clunker, so that used car segment will do well as the older used car supply is depleted.
What was really a headache was fulfilling the terms of the rebates on a box full of 1-quart oil cans. They required you to cut out a symbol from the outside of every single can. But the cans were cardboard with a thin inside layer of some oil resistant material, and the rebate deadline always came before you'd used all the cans. So you had to use a knife or razor *VERY* carefully to cut the logo from the outside shiny paper along with a few layers of the cardboard underneath, without cutting through the cardboard *too* much.
I remember at a dinky little gas station I worked at in the early 70s, the only way to buy unleaded gas was not from a pump, but from a big barrel with a spigot in the same shed as the air compressor. Never called it "unleaded," but rather "white gas". Campers bought it for their Coleman lanterns, and backpackers for their camp stoves, which would have clogged up quick with leaded gas.
When they started requiring annual emissions testing in COLO, my old van miraculously passed the "no visible tailpipe emissions" test each year, and I never questioned how this could be. Well, the reason was that my annual test was in January, and since I had it done at a little gas station that tested only outside, the cold weather made it difficult to tell whether you were looking at heated water vapor or smoke. And the gas jockey always gave me (wrongly) the benefit of the doubt.
But one fine summer day when I took it out of mothballs to donate to our church in response to a newsletter request, and was required to first get its paperwork up to date including an emissions test, the tester was required to fail me, because the stuff you could clearly see coming out of the tailpipe on a warm day was definitely 100% smoke and 0% water vapor. Being a kindly sort, he gave me some advice on how to get it to pass. He directed me to an auto parts store to buy an oil additive called "No Smoke" that I'd never heard of.
It was the first product I'd ever bought that had the instructions in Spanish *first* on the label, and the English version at the bottom. (Is it racist of me to merely mention this fact? If so, apologies in advance). I dumped the entire contents into the engine, drove it a few miles, and voila, no smoke! I took it back to the same guy for a retest, it passed just fine this time, and I donated it to our church, along with a tip to the janitorial staff about prepping the engine just before next year's license renewal & emissions test. (Boy, those automotive engineers in Spain really know what they're doing, eh? :-) )
Original Cash for Clunkers cost me $9000 because I was trying to buy a 2yo F150 at auction just as the program was kicking in. We started bidding when prices for ‘07s coming off lease averaged $12.5. Each week the price jumped $2-3K, and before my buyer caught on to what was going on we couldn’t find a car for under $20K. Ended up buying one off a lot for $21,000.
Thank you Obama.
Oh yeah, I remember that piercing spout. After you’d emptied the can and turned it upright, oil would drip down between the outside of the can and the spout, making a mess if you weren’t prepared with a paper towel to catch it. If the gas station didn’t have a spout like that, they’d give you a paper funnel.
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