Another "Clunkers" SNAFU: Car-Trashing Not Happening
August 02, 2009
The nation's new and too-popular Cash for Clunkers program has been a boon for the nation's newest car buyers -- but the Car Allowance Rebate System's execution has not been one of the federal government's shining moments.
The big problems centered on the inadequacy of the CARS hotline to help consumers and dealers, and of course the program's major issue: a dramatic and almost comedic underestimation of initial consumer response that drained the $1-billion CARS piggy bank in what is projected to be little more than a week.
Now come reports of another CARS foible: a lack of oversight to ensure the engines of the traded-in clunkers are destroyed, as the program requires.
A caller to a syndicated talk-radio program who claimed to be the operator of a salvage yard in a large metro area said none of the clunkers coming to salvage yard have had their engines run through with the chemical mix that replaces the lube oil and junks the engine.
The caller said auto dealers in the area had been doing Cash for Clunkers deals at such a breakneck pace that none had bothered to destroy the engines, which supposedly insures the vehicle would not return to the road. Other parts and components can be salvaged and recycled, but the CARS law clearly states the vehicles' drivetrains must be rendered inoperable in order to guarantee the environmental "upgrade" of removing that vehicle from service in favor of the new, more-efficient model purchased by the clunker's owner.
Initial critics of the CARS program had expressed concern careless or corrupt players might attempt to game the system by returning clunkers -- particularly those at the more valuable end of the value bandwidth -- back to the used-car market. -- Bill Visnic
Posted by Michelle Krebs at 5:45 PM under Companies , In the Media , News | Comments (2) | digg this | Seed Newsvine
The rules have been changed and now they don't require the engine be disabled before applying for the rebate, but do require that it be done before the vehicle leaves property controlled or owned by the dealer. NHTSA says one benefit of this is that it will allow for dealers to be audited to make sure now they're really killing the engine first.
Posted by: dg0472 | August 02, 2009 at 7:53 PM
So, frankly, why must they insist on destroying an engine which could very well be in perfectly good working order and could be resold or stripped down for component parts? That's almost sacreligious of you ask me. It would be far more environmentally sound to strip out some of the vehicles' key drivetrain components rendering them inoperable then send the cars to salvage where they can be stripped for their remaining parts. That way the car is taken off the road, the old car has a higher value than simply scrap metal, and the salvage yards which do, incidentally, employ people, can have a source of parts to sell. I never thought "reduce, reuse, and recycle" meant "intentionally pour chemicals into a perfectly good engine causing it to sieze up and self destruct." There has to be a better way than this.
Posted by: pfine | August 05, 2009 at 6:17 AM