http://www.houston-imports.com/forums/show...35&posted=1

OMG!!!

Holy mother of god. I always wanted one of those....

Damn.

after cash for clunker, should be going straight to metal scrap and can't re-sell what Goverment said.
Maybe I am wrong ...

might be a good time to make friends with some sketchy junkyard folk

I sincerely hope this on-the-job training program experiment will be over soon...

I had a salesman at a local Toyota dealer ask if I was taking advantage of the CFC program when I wheeled up in my ratty looking '87 4Runner. I asked him if that was the program where they give me $4500.00 for my truck. He told me it was. I offered to walk home after I cleaned out the glove box and he wrote the check. He gave me a blank look and started to explain the program. The parts manager there is a friend of mine, and he said that once the engines are killed, the rest of the car is being sold to recycling yards. I thought they were going to be crushed, but apparently not. I wonder how many of the cars sold on this program will be repossessed before Christmas?

OWOWOWOWOW Big Suckage. (fill in some more swear words here)

Now, having said that, it makes my 87 GTA worth just a teeny little bit more......

I knew this was gonna happen, but I was hoping it wouldnt be a nice one. GEEZ

Make me an offer Kevin.

bock

3 lug nuts and all the change I can dig out from under the back seat of my Camaro?

Are they Chrome?
b

At least one of them is.

(Psst. My Camaro doesn't have a back seat...or front seats for that matter).

Bummer! I looked at one of the clunker lists and M3s , yeah M3s were on it! I'll be none of those were turned in!

The whole thing was a farce. It perpetuates planned obsolescence, increases energy usage, continues to throw money at companies that needed to fail so they could rebuild, and continues to stiff dealers through delayed payment. And on top of that, NONE of the top 10 vehicles purchased through the program were from GM or Chrysler.

Not only all that, but think about "most" people who are driving cars worth less than $4500. Most of them aren't driving them by choice - they simply can't afford better. So, we now stick them into a new car where they may not be able to afford the payments long term.

Plus, many people who were going to buy new cars in the next year bought them now. You're going to see huge fall-offs in car sales soon.

Oh, FYI - the engine and a couple other large components (tranny, etc.) can't be reused. But, the rest of the car can be dismantled and resold. Saw it in the regulations when I was reading them.

vette footages follows: (this is very hard to watch guys and gals) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTYL-h5_hb4

a guy lives his whole life wanting one of these and somebody blows one up on purpose.... my god i think i want to puke..

Snuff films....

What year was that? What a shame, I wonder what it was traded for.

Looked like an '85 to me.

Wow, that TA has better paint than mine.

This is absolutely wicked, and wrong. It's a shitty misuse of resources and is inefficient.

I'm glad I didn't see an SVO Mustang.

There's a thread on corner carvers where someone traded in a very nice condition "4 eye" '86 GT. Another tragic loss.

What a colossal waste. Those cars should be headed to auctions instead.

My son works at a Honda dealership, he has the task of blowing up the clunkers. What a terrible first job for a gear head kid! I was on the lot the other day looking at the line of clunkers, they had a nice 5 series BMW, a very clean mustang, a ton of F150's 4 Runners ect... out of about 85 cars, only two or three would I consider a clunker. On another lot, there is a clean C4 convertible on the "clunker pile" that is on display, it has a Suburban sitting on it's hood and windshild!

Such a crappy program. A friend and I got to talking about this. We figured out that the least this stupid program could do was donate the cars off to be used in demolition derbies, charge admission to get in to watch and donate the proceeds to charity. That would be a better way to go than this... blown up and scrapped. What a crock.

....yet!

That's why I called that little project "Crush Your Classic" The ONLY people being serviced there are the car buyers, and maybe, after a while, the car manufacturers. I drive by dealerships here in Texas and see back lots FULL of older cars. There are complaints from dealerships that while they have moved inventory, many have been stuck with many vehicles they haven't been paid for yet at $3500-$4500 a pop, and they can't get rid of.

The auto recycle industry is not being helped much, and those in the car restoration/repair industry aren't being helped at all. There's lots of usable parts that will never be made available to anyone to use or make some money off of.

Yet another knee-jerk government project.

A lot of these cars could have been donated to charities instead of being euthanized.

I drive by a junk yard every day on my way to work and back. I think alot of the "cash for clunker" cars are now starting to show up at the yards. This yard is overflowing with vehicles. They've got so many that they've had to resort to filling their customer parking lot, and "front yard" with cars. There has to be at least 200 to 300 cars outside of their actual yard. In the 3 years I've been driving by this yard, I've never seen them park cars outside of their locked gates/fence until now.

Eric, which yard? It might be time to go shopping

Some of those cars may be repo's - repo business is booming. I spoke with a tow truck operator who was visiting our parking lot looking for a vehicle on his list. He's making 5-6K a WEEK...

I know I was thinking the same thing. I was scanning the lot looking for F-bodies. There's alot of F-bodies up here in Lake County so I'd think our'd luck would be pretty good. The yard is a Pick-n-Pull. It's on hwy 41 in Wadsworth. It's right on the Porner about 1/2 mile from the IL/WI boarder.

While the rules may have changed, it is my understanding that CFC cars had to go directly to the crusher in their entirety. That's what was so effed up about the whole project, charities don't get the donation money, and some have certainly felt the bite from this project, and parts recyclers don't get to recycle any parts, and they are angry about that.

Perhaps, if they are CFC cars, they are just waiting their time in the crusher.

I thought it was just the motors that couldn't be re-used, but I think I remember hearing/reading something along those lines that the whole car was to be crushed because I thought that it's just gonna hurt the folks who can't afford a new car or heck even new parts, which didn't really seem right.

The engines had to be run with the magic crystals until it died, then they had to try to fire it again after some time to make sure it wouldn't start. I believe the dealers decided what to do with the cars, but many of them went to the salvage yards.

Jason

Somewhat related, I received this internet "factoid" in an email today.



Kinda makes you think. I realize that it was supposed to be an initial push towards having more fuel efficient cars on the road and possibly jump-start the economy, but at what cost? I'm not sure that we really did anything to help the environment or stimulate the economy much.

WOW, I wonder how accurate that is. On the surface it seems right. Unfortunately I'm not entirely surprised. Is there any program run by the US govt that makes money or at least breaks even?

Most dealers are happy that they moved a ton of inventory in a very short time, but they are concerned that all we did was pull car sales forward and that the gains are not sustainable.

The conversions all seem correct, however, that assumes that we get 55 gallons of gasoline out of a 55 gallon barrel of oil. I'm not an oil man, but that hardly seems right.

I'm a fan of the K.I.S.S. method, but I think that one was over-simplified a bit.

According to the info on this site, anywhere from 19.5 to 28 gallons per barrel. A barrel actually seems to be 42 gallons vs. the 55 gallons I had imagined: http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/eng99/eng99288.htm

Plugging those numbers into the calculation it saves 8-11.5 million barrels of oil to come up with the same amount of gasoline. It's not completely true because the other parts of the barrel can be refined into products as well.

Anyway, 8-11.5M bbl x $70/bbl = $560M-$805M

They also forgot to figure in that's the savings PER YEAR. So, on the $3B spent, it will take 3.7 to 5.3 years to equal the reduction in dependence on foreign oil vs. if they had just given out $3B in free gas. Assuming you just gave everyone over the age of 18 a gas gift card, everyone could've got $13.33 worth of gas...

Yeah I didn't question the math, though I already assumed it was slanted to make more impressive figures for those against the program. It seems that with the corrected math that maybe it actually isn't so bad if you assume people would have driven the clunker for ~5 additional years and as many miles vs. the new car. I'd bet alot of the true "clunkers" traded in probably weren't driven nearly 12k/year.