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Comments
My old 97 voyager would not qualify at all since it got 19MPG combined. If you have an old suv/truck and you are downsizing you are in luck. If you run a business and have an old truck and need a new one this is good for you too. Some people will also just luck out by having a pig on gas and very steep depreciation so it will work for them. IF the industry actually sells 9M vehicles this year the rate is 750K per month so yes in theory they could run out of money in a week or so if everyone who bought a vehicle used the program. Highly unlikely since there are credits on hybrids still around. IF you are going that route then you could save more. I believe Ford's are still getting the hybrid credit and some GM vehicles. :surprise:
The Tax credit on TDI jettas is $1,300 right now.
I said that was fine, but that would also take me out of the market, so I wasn't too interested in doing a non-refundable deposit (perhaps if I was ready to buy I'd think about it - but we aren't even taking price yet).
This is a small dealership with at least 10 pre-sold clunker cars sitting on the back lot waiting for the rules to be finalized. Multiply that by 10,000 dealers and you're at 100,000 cars already. There's enough money for 250,000 vouchers so they could go fast.
(I'm guessing at the dealer numbers - there's about 6500 GM dealers left, 3,000 Ford dealers, 1800 or so Toyota dealers, etc.).
Got diverted by a phone call - Mickeyrom, the program ends in November or when the money runs out. It's only a billion dollars.
Kdhspyder, that was two sales by one salesperson. I don't know - this small shop looked to have 3 other salespeople and the floor manager. There were 8 presales for sure on Saturday morning. (The Prius II is still on our list btw).
Gasmizr, we've been shopping for over a year, and visiting dealers since November. If we miss this round of vouchers and the program ends, no biggie. We'll just push a dealer to give us $2,000 for the van instead of the $1,000 it's worth and just leave $1,500 or $2,500 on the table. Since we drive them forever, it's worth a $200 a year loss to drive what we really want since we've always kept new cars for a decade so far.
I'm going to guess that the money will run out on August 10th.
Sometimes it's time to say goodbye to an old friend.
I knew they had electrical problems galore and I knew they are VERY expensive to keep on the road but I didn't know that aluminum 215 cubic inch Buick engine was hard on head gaskets. that engine came to life in 1961 Buick Specials and Bucik dumped it after only three years. Funny the Brits would pick up on it and use it for many years!
As troublesome as a Disco can be, they are damm tough and strong to say the least. I'll bet that crusher is going to moan and groan when it go's through!
Our GM won't let us sell any that are traded in. We have to wholesale them or sell them to the LR dealer. We've been burned too many times.
Still, they can do things and go places othr cars can't.
Something similar happened to me a few months ago with my 95 SHO. Maybe it was worth $2500, but when I had a minor fender bender, I couldn't get $500 for it. It cost more to repair than it was worth, and of course, I had dropped collision coverage on it. So suddenly my $2500 is worth scrap value. The same scenario can be applied to this program. What is worth $4500 now, may suddenly become $250 if you have even a minor accident. If the government weren't offering $4500, keep the clunker. But the $4500 could dry up easily with a repair or minor accident if you don't use it. You can always pick up another beater that didn't qualify for the program for $500 if you really need one.
I had a customer decide to wait for whatever reason for a couple of weeks.
Well, he snapped his timing belt and now his MPV won't run at all. What would have been worth 4500.00 is now worth nothing.
So true.
I am driving my '94 Acura Legend GS very, very carefully each day. BTW, I still don't know whether it is eligible or not. Anyone can help me out here?
This website lists '95 Acura Legend as eligible, but not '94. The '95 version is basically the same as the '94 one. This inconsistency leads me not to trust all the info posted on this website.
Well, he snapped his timing belt and now his MPV won't run at all. What would have been worth 4500.00 is now worth nothing.
Surely it wouldn't cost more than $4500 to fix his vehicle. Oh wait - maybe he was an idiot and bought an interference engine with a belt. Mine's non-interference and a chain for a reason. $300 fix if it breaks, tops.(plus you don't have to remove the head to get at it - just pop off the timing chain cover and the water pump)
Yup plenty of good parts to be had from that car and if they are in good shape even better.
I can see the crusher really struggling with that boxed frame if they do crush the frame. I know of several people who have done frame swaps on old Discos after frame damage or severe rust. The aluminum body is always fine but the frame can be damaged eventually.
I knew they had electrical problems galore and I knew they are VERY expensive to keep on the road but I didn't know that aluminum 215 cubic inch Buick engine was hard on head gaskets. that engine came to life in 1961 Buick Specials and Bucik dumped it after only three years. Funny the Brits would pick up on it and use it for many years!
Yeah buick got lazy and didn't want to deal with the expense and difficulty of building an all aluminum engine back in the 60s. The brits spent enough time working with that engine and redesigning it to really get the most out of it. The last 4.6 liter versions of it didn't even really have head gasket problems as long as they were installed properly and the engine didn't overheat badly.
Driving it 200,000 miles without changing it is another story.
Hardly a reason not to buy a car.
Aren't most old pushrod V-8 engines interference designs, anyway? Years ago, a friend of a friend of mine had a '69 or '70 Olds Delta 88 with a 425 big block, and the timing chain went on it, and smashed the valves.
The 2.7 in my 2000 Intrepid is an interference engine, and uses a timing chain. The 3.2/3.5, however, are non-interference and use a belt.
True. But I'm certainly going to take into account the cost of scheduled maintenance when I pick a car to replace my Ram 1500/Civic combo sometime in the next few weeks.
Honda now uses timing chains on its four cylinder engines--a real plus alongside the Hyundai Elantra, which uses a belt with a 60k replacement interval on an interference engine.
Not quite a deal killer but a definite minus.
Mickeyrom, an interference engine can suffer bent valves, damaged pistons or worse when a timing belt/chain breaks. A non-interference engine will simply lose power but usually doesn't damage any of the internal parts if the belt breaks. Still not a safe situation if you lose your engine on the freeway in rush hour, but lots of us ignore the recommended timing belt change interval knowing our engines are non-interference.
When the timing belt breaks, the valves pretty much stop right where they are...some totally closed, some totally open, and some somewhere in between. However, the pistons keep moving up and down. On a non-interference engine, the pistons can't reach any of the valves, but on the interference, they'll smash the valves that they can reach.
As an aside,I had a 1987 Chrysler Lebaron Coupe, and at 100,000 miles the timing belt broke.It damaged nothing at all, I had to simply replace the belt and drive it. It was good for at least 44,000 miles at which point I wrecked the car, and traded it.
A few hours in a CAD program by a Toyota engineer back in 1985 solved this problem.(technically Dodge did it first with their HEMI engines) Just no excuse after what - several decades - to see engines destroying themselves due to timing chain/belt issues. It's like buying a car with drum brakes in the rear. Just exactly HOW cheap do they have to be to do that sort of thing these days?
Back to clunkers, More Than 100,000 Car Shoppers Waiting to Buy (AutoObserver)
"CARS backers estimate the program will add 250,000 vehicle sales in its three months it is in effect."
Most OHC fours used a chain till about 1980 (Fiat and Lotus used belts earlier). The '80s and '90s were the heyday of the timing belt, though Saturn bucked the trend by using a chain in its 1.9L engine. Toyota and Honda began moving back toward chains in the past decade.
Pushrod engines (those without an overhead camshaft) almost never use a belt. This includes most traditional Detroit V6s and V8s, but I'm not sure of the origin of the Chrysler 3.8 design.
I had an '88 LeBaron turbo coupe. The servicing interval for the timing belt was every 60K miles as I recall, but we were bad and waited until 90k.
The Toyota Prius has drum brakes in back! :surprise: Personally, I think disc brakes in the rear are over-rated. Maybe in some high-performance car that you want to push to the limit on a regular basis, but I'd imagine most of the masses wouldn't know what kind of brakes they have in back.
There may be a better way to do this, or a more concise list on the internet somewhere, but there is a timing belt brochure pdf that can be downloaded at: http://www.gates.com/brochure.cfm?brochure=2256&location_id=3487
In the brochure, they put an asterisk next to the engines that are interference.
However, this only works for cars that have a timing belt, since it's a timing belt brochure! If the car has a timing chain, I don't know if there's a way to tell.
Me too and I liked that about the Prius. Everytime a salesperson brags about rear discs, I tell them that my minivan rear drums are still OEM at 133k and in theory I could change them (it's been 30 years since I did a drum brake replacement). On my Outback, the pads would be easy to change back there, but for the ebrake. It sounds like a real hassle to fool with because of the internal drum rear hand brake stuff.
Anybody buying Friday?
(Take Gates with a grain of salt - they sell belts and I think they are wrong about my van).
So I don't think this bill will affect the classic car market at all. If there is such a thing as a classic car since 1985 at least the body parts will be available to the trade.
And while there isn't much in the way of "classics" from 1985-2001, I still can't see very many worthwhile cars getting crushed. For example, let's suppose that some kid has a well-preserved 1986 Monte Carlo with a 305, that he's put a lot of time, money, and devotion into. I really couldn't him suddenly getting dollar signs in his eyes, and condemning it to the crusher just to get $4500 off of a new Hyundai! For one thing, if the kid put that much effort into the Monte, it's pretty evident that the Monte is what he wants, not some new economy car. And if the car's really nice, he could probably find someone willing to pay $4500 or more for it, anyway. And even if he couldn't, the car is probably worth more than $4500 to him.
Now, if it was a ratted out Monte Carlo, that would be a different story. I had a 1986, which is why the above example popped into my mind. It had 192,000 miles on it when I got t-boned. The dash was cracked, the paint was horribly faded, there was a worn spot in the carpet, the power antenna was broken, but in the up position at least, and the stand-up knight hood ornament had broken off, and was in the trunk. I could see someone with a car like that going for a deal like this, if they were in the market for a new car. I wouldn't have, just because I'd be thinking about the bigger cost picture...monthly payments, insurance, and so forth. Plus the fact that if I wanted the full $4500, I'd have to get a car that got something like 27-28 mpg combined, and that market is mostly small cars.
For crying out loud, just replace the belt every 100,000 mjiles or whatever the book says and you'll never have a problem!
It's all about engineering compromises. A FWD, belt-driven car is cheaper and easier to make than a RWD, chain-driven car, pound for pound.
Which is why MOST cars today are.....??? (and also why you can buy a perfectly wonderful little car for $16000 in 2009).
So my TCO just took a big pop. It's my old printer example. I have a 17 year old Laserjet III that gets the job done and the toner lasts forever. I've turned down offers of free inkjets because the ink dries up in 3 months and that's a $20 bill to get it going again.
I wouldn't be driving a clunker if I didn't know how to make it run a long time without burning a hole in my wallet every six months.
Which brings me back around to the process of the deal.
I'm looking seriously at maybe half a dozen different possibilities to replace my clunker (and my old Civic as well). Where in the past I would've just gone to my local Honda dealer and called for "the usual," there are more good choices than there were the last time I was in the market. This, in turn, means that I may find myself choosing not just on the basis of the car itself but the dealer as well.
There are several open issues, and in the absence of clear guidance from NHTSA I'm wondering if different dealers will approach each one differently:
1. Paperwork snafus. Will dealers have adequate info to perform due diligence on the C4C vehicles? Will they apply a uniform standard of documentation? Will insurance companies be prepared to issue a standard "statement of continuous coverage" if I can't find an outdated insurance card because I cleaned out the glove compartment? Will DMV offices around the country be providing a "statement of continuous registration"? Or will lots of folks be unable to take advantage of the program because they lost last year's registration card?
2. If a dealership does its due diligence and then receives notice of a problem from NHTSA, will that come back to bite the dealer--or the customer?
3. What happens when the $1B runs out? Will dealers who have voucher claims pending be left out in the cold? And if so, will they go after the customers for more money after the fact?
4. The latest info from cars.gov says dealers can begin to register on the 23rd, and processing of vouchers will begin on the 27th. Are dealers vetted at all in this process--do they have to designate someone as their C4C point person, and have that person demonstrate sufficient knowledge of the regulations?
5. Perhaps most pressingly of all, can all of these matters be resolved by the time the program "goes live."
My usual response to a situation like this would be to wait a few weeks for the bugs to be worked out of the system, but of course there's the possibility of the program ending early because the money runs out.
I'd be particularly interested in hearing from anyone out there who works for a participating dealership on these matters. I think the stickiness of some of these rules will make it even more important than usual to buy from a trusted dealership.
Seems to me that the interference design is faulty.Why make any engine less reliable on purpose,unless they just want to sell the service.
I had the same conclusion when I visited http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/findacar.htm: the data starts at year 1985.
If true, this indicates that the MPG ratings used to determine eligibility will be based on the http://www.fueleconomy.gov/ numbers and not by VIN.
BTW, On Friday July 24th, dealers will not be able to input sales for NHTSA processing until Monday July 27th.
I wonder why 60K? Honda says 105,000 miles or 7 years whichever comes first.