Cash for gas guzzling clunkers, the US system may trip people up

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The fact that scrappage incentives have never been introduced before means that they are new to everyone. However although the UK scheme is purely a financial stimulus and is not specifically designed to rid the country of horrible dirty old bangers it does seem to be having that effect. On the other hand with a great many buyers coming from the demographic of parents disposing of an old family car which is usually driven by the youngest offspring, it will be interesting to see just how many new cars there will be which may still be pretty gas guzzling and “unfriendly” to the environment..

The UK system seems to rely on the fact that people will trade in for smaller more economical cars which by definition are much cheaper thus getting an environmental knock-on, and this certainly appears to be the reality. In other countries, and particularly in the US there seems to be much more emphasis on ridding the streets of ‘dirty’ cars but certainly not replacing them with similar. In other words it’s not just the older car that needs to qualify it is also the car being sold -and we thought it might be complicated here!
In fact although most car makers, who have a big share of the UK market, will have a fairly wide choice of models in its stable, this pales into insignificance when compared with the choice on offer in the states, which will surely only lead to bureaucratic mistakes.

Knowing how they sometimes operate over there it will probably only be a matter of time before a customer has his car scrapped and has his new car sitting proudly on his drive when someone decides that the car he has bought in actual fact doesn’t qualify after all.

Let’s face it as bad as this may be it is only a symptom of an industry that has built gas guzzling monstrosities for fun for a number of decades and only the fact that fuel has been a fraction of the cost which most of the rest of the world pays has encouraged the situation they currently find themselves in.