The hard part has been finding a car! After a week of dwindling inventories we nailed down two possibilities and after a little wrangling we got it for $250 over invoice, minus $9000 in incentives including Cash for Clunkers. Next Wednesday I drag our old shitheap over the hill to Denver and pick up my wife’s loaded 2009 Town and Country Touring 25th Anniversary. All told, we will subtract about $13,000 from the sticker price. Not too shabby.
Anybody else partaking? Any horror stories?
If you want a horror story…rather than providing more funding for alternative modes of transportation, like public transit, carpool systems, and making cities more bicycle-friendly, the federal government is using my tax money to help people who bought crappy cars buy slightly less-crappy cars. That way we can be sure we’re doing everything we can to keep the dream of everyone in America owning a personal gas-guzzler alive.
Amusingly (to me, anyway), our craptastic 1991 Toyota Corolla is apparently not clunkery enough to qualify for the program.
Oh, well. I didn’t really want to buy American anyway.
Not to go off on a debate or anything, but our county just received an initial $1.6 million in stimulus for three of your four points. (Carpools are not addressed. :() In fact, we’re so green we’re even upgrading our buses to natural gas!
As for CARS, if you consider some folks are saddled with 12-year-old gas guzzlers because they operate a farm or ranch, this program is a boon.
That’s $11.40 per capita. Wow!
Anyway that T & C Anniversary looks like a nice vehicle and you definitely got a sweet deal. Enjoy.
Alas, my 1994 car, while old, does not qualify because it gets good mileage. YAYYYY HONDA!!! Actually, good for me now because no matter how much discount I would get off a new car, I am currently unemployed and in no position to pay for a new car until I have a regular paycheck again and know where I stand financially.
And, oh yeah, my next new car will NOT be GM, Chrysler, Ford, etc. Honda has proven it’s value to me and I’ll be sticking with them in the future.
Yeah, I was a little off. The bus system alone is getting $1.5 million for a single project. Wow is right!
If it hadn’t been for a head-on collision I’d still have my 92 Celica as a goof-off car. It was fun.
Allow me to also register my annoyance about the fact that my tax money will support your purchase of a luxury vehicle with the thoroughly unimpressive gas-mileage of 16 city/23 highway.
Few events over the past several years have made me more annoyed to live in this society and pay anything in taxes than this program. It is, in all honesty, the most retarded idea that the Obama administration has yet entertained. I had high hopes that he would apply rigorous intellect to government decision making and prioritizing the most important issues facing our nation like reforming healthcare, controlling greenhouse emissions, or reducing the national debt. Apparently giving out political hand-jobs via unsustainable programs to destroy wealth to temporarily prop up flailing poll numbers are more important to the Obama administration.
Enjoy your craptastic Chrysler minivan and being the recipient of nonsensical government largess which couldn’t possibly be afforded to the entire nation. Bread and circuses.
I agree with pretty much all of this. If last night’s news is correct, so many people have taken advantage of this program that it’s already running short of money. The analysts on the news expected Congress to add more to top up the fund.
I was, and in most areas still am, a huge Obama supporter, but this program sucks. I don’t blame the OP, or other Americans, for taking advantage of it, but it should never have been implemented in the first place.
I can’t figure out how they figure out the mileage for the cars. I pay attention to the mileage I get, and it’s nothing like their website shows.
Who is “they”?
Are you talking about the car companies’ own figures? EPA figures? Something else?
Sorry. The CARS website.
I’m confident the original plan featured a much more limited set of clunkers and much more rigid mileage limitations…then it got to Congress where it got expanded for political expediency and to guarantee the votes from the Senators and Representatives from car producing states.
The basic idea is sound. The vast majority of pollution is caused by a very small percentage of the cars on the road. Malcolm Gladwell had an amazing article in the Feb 13, 2006 issue of New Yorker that introduced the ideas that eventually became his best seller “The Tipping Point” called “Million Dollar Murry”. Car pollution follows a power-law distribution:
The idea was to get that five percent. Shockingly, on it’s journey through the sausage factory on the Hill, it became pork. I wouldn’t blame the Obama administration.
Did they promise not to come in your mouth? Invoice? Biggest scam in “CarSalesWorld”! Incentives? Analogous for “Butt-fuck”. $13k from the sticker? That means the sticker was inflated $15k. (Just think of the poor idiot paying “sticker” right now! :eek: )
Cash for Clunkers is the greatest rip-off of the American Consumer since… Fuck! I can’t come up with anything!
Interestingly enough, two cars that I own are on that list–1993 Infiniti J30 and 2001 Kia Sportage. The Infiniti doesn’t get great mileage but it’s always passed the emissions test quite easily–I have been complimented on how clean it runs. The Sportage gets more than 20 mpg even when my husband is driving it, and has gotten up to 28 mpg when I drive it. (On the highway. Going mostly downhill, I guess.)
Okay, I just looked at the list again. Both the Kia and the J30 have manual transmissions. I think this means they are not really on that list. Too bad; I was thinking if I traded them both in I might end up with a decent car.
Even that is kind of missing the point, though. Until there’s a massive change in mindset, the majority of individuals are going to continue pumping out small amounts of pollutants, every day, multiple times a day. Yes, getting inefficient cars off the road is a good thing, but it’s not going to do much good unless we also do something about the millions of people contributing a drop in the bucket. “Here, we’ll help you buy this car which runs a bit cleaner - but is still incredibly toxic to produce, ship here, and sure as hell isn’t pumping sunshine and gumdrops out the tailpipe” is a stupid idea. If it were part of a greater program and being used as a first step in reducing the number of cars, that would be better, but it’s not.
The way to reduce pollution is to get people to drive less. Reduce the amount that people drive and not only will we reduce pollution, but we might also have fewer fatasses in this country, too.
You’re not required to buy domestic according to cars.gov
You’re welcome:)
You’re not just preaching to the choir, you’re preaching to the choir director. I’ve never driven and my wife and I live in Chicago and haven’t had a car in all the time we lived there, getting everywhere by the CTA. My carbon footprint is so small I can be downright smug about it. I’d be overjoyed to see every internal-combustion engine disappear from the face of the earth tomorrow.
But, that’s not going to happen.
As Voltaire said The perfect is the enemy of the good (Man, do I feel like a twat quoting Voltaire, but it is apt.)*
We don’t have the option of making all the internal-combustion engines disappear tomorrow or even next week. Until we do, we have to try to make the ones we’re stuck with better. In the article I quoted, they used a portable emissions testing system and found that taxicabs were a huge source of emissions. One Bell cab in LA was producing it’s weight in hydrocarbons every year, and you could literally run another car on it’s exhaust.
A tax incentive to taxicab companies to replace their fleet with hybrids would have a profound impact on local air quality, by making all those idling, carbon-spewing clunkers disappear. Now if we can get the morons in Detroit to make the cab needed. And maybe they can put some freaking legroom in for the passengers? I don’t hold a lot of hope though. We were telling Detroit that we wanted a van you could stand up in since the 1970s with the whole van-conversion industry. It only took Detroit 30 years to start producing the Sprinter, a van you could stand up in (actually, it took the Germans to make it and force Dodge to sell it).