Cash For Clunkers: Fortune Favors the Impatient
Do you have a vehicle that was eligible for the government’s CARS program until the EPA revised old mileage averages? If so, your vehicle is no longer eligible for the $3,500-$4,500 incentive. If you had set up a deal before the final rule came out, however, the government will hook you up regardless. “We’ve tried to come up with the fairest possible solution under the circumstances,” CARS’ long-suffering spokesman, Rae Tyson, explains to Automotive News [sub]. But it’s hard to see what exactly is fair about that. Didn’t NHTSA specifically warn that “if a dealer chooses to structure a transaction before the final rule is issued, they will bear the risks associated with later demonstrating that the transaction meets all of the specifications of the final rule”? Why are the folks who ignored the warning being rewarded, while those who waited for the rules get the shaft? More importantly, if anyone got away with engine-melting a 1987 Alfa GTV (recently reprieved by the EPA mileage mulligan), there are going to be phones ringing in at least one congresscritter’s office. Hit the jump for a complete list of clunkers which saw their eligibility change due to the EPA revision.
VEHICLES NOW ELIGIBLE
1987 Buick Regal
VEHICLES NO LONGER ELIGIBLE
1987 Alfa Romeo GTV
More by Edward Niedermeyer
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I don't get all the comparisons of the total suckage of this scrappage program with the post office. USPS has its problems, but as an ebay trader I can nearly always count on two- to three-day priority mail service coast to coast, and one package in the last ten years has failed to arrive, and no package has arrived with the contents damaged so I had to make good on it. The scrappage program, on the other hand, just plain effing sucks. The only way it could be made better imo is if the turned-in vehicles were turned over for free to the local demolition-derby crowd. That would realize the objective of getting them off the roads.