Cash for Clunker's Computer Clunks Out
Here’s a fun one: You’re a car dealer trying to get a bunch of clunker sales processed in the last, oh, five hours of the program when the government’s computer system crashes. Was it too busy insidiously taking over the private computers of American citizens and passing the information on to foreign governments? Automotive News [sub] won’t say.
“To better meet the high demand we’re experiencing, we have temporarily shut down the service so we can expand our capacity to more quickly serve your requests. Please visit the site at a later time. We apologize for any inconvenience,” is the website’s current position, according to dealers quoted in AN. Having endured the odd server meltdown here at TTAC, we sympathize. Popularity has its downsides.
The NHTSA’s official response sounds a familiar refrain in the web era. The problem was “related to the substantial increase in capacity that the department is bringing online to review transactions and process payments to dealers,” according to spokesfolks. They claim the problem has been fixed.
Tomorrow’s AN headline today? “Dealers report masses of unfiled clunker deals, lawsuit/ bailout pending.”
More by Edward Niedermeyer
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Gee....I wonder....Did the Government IT Geek think, while driving to work this morning, that it might be a good idea to expand the capacity of the system today? Did he walk into his boss's office after his morning coffee and make the suggestion to expand the system? Was it his idea or his boss's to shut the system down in the middle of the day to perform this upgrade? It seems to me that this whole upgrade thing was really poorly planned. Wouldn't seem more logical to have made this upgrade in the middle of the night when web traffic would have been slower and be less of an incovience to the "customers"? Ah yes, as I have said before, this is the same government that wants to run your healthcare.
Cash for Clunkers is dead; long live the free market. Unfortunately, I have a feeling we're about to see sales sink like a stone, and stay that way for at least for the next several months.
@GS650G : Actually, I'd say the overwhelming majority of us are living in the real world, where it's more important to make things work, and adherence to crackpot ideology - like Rand's - is a secondary consideration.