cash for clunkers stimulus

cash for clunkers stimulus

The Cash for Clunkers stimulus is: well, it depends on your political viewpoint actually.

From one side Cash for Clunkers is a marvellous idea, it gets old polluting autos off the streets and into the scrap yards at the same time that it stimulates purchases of cars made right here in the Good Old USA. From the other side Cash for Clunkers is simply the politicians in power buying off one of their support groups with your and my tax money. Both descriptions of Cash for Clunkers could in fact be true, they are not mutually contradictory. You are entirely at liberty to believe one, both, either or neither of the explanations.

But what is the actual deal available under Cash for Clunkers? The official document is here. In essence, your old auto that you are getting rid of must be more than 8 years old and less than twenty five. It must get a combined MPG (ie, an average of town and country driving) of less than 18 mpg. It must be scrapped after you have traded it in, it cannot be resold (although some parts can be). To see if your old car gets under 18 mpg look at fueleconomy.gov. No, it doesn't matter what you actually get: it's what the EPA thinks you get that matters here, only their estimations count.

Because the old car must be scrapped under the Cash for Clunkers stimulus program you probably will not get the trade in value of it: you might get offered the scrap value, but not the trade in value. However, you will get a minimum of $3,500 as a discount on the sticker price of your new car and this must be in addition to any other offer or discount the dealer or the auto company is offering. The discount can be a little higher than that, up to $5,000 according to some reports, $4,500 to others. You don't need a voucher or to do anything else to get the money off: that's up to the dealer to get back from the Government.

Only one discount per person though, and yes, this applies to people who are jointly registered on a vehicle as well. So if Mom and Dad are on the registration for the high school boy's car and also the college girl's car then there's only one discount available in the family. Your new car must have a regular sticker price of less than $45,000. The Cash for Clunkers discount applies both to purchases and leases.

There is supposed to be an interactive tool at www.cars.gov to tell you which new cars qualify for the discount: explaining things like combined mpg and so on, but it appears not to be ready as yet.

Two final points about the Cash for Clunkers stimulus plan. The rules are slightly different for passenger automobiles, light trucks (SUVs etc), work trucks and larger trucks, worth checking out the full law linked to above.

Secondly, Cash for Clunkers runs until 1 November this year or when the money runs out, whichever happens first. As there's only enough cash for 250,000 cars, the betting is it'll be the money gone long before November.