scrappage scheme - disaster !
 

my mate sells toyotas, mainly commercials

he was horrified the other day when he found a mint swb cruiser in the scrappage area, only 80k on the clock. His collegues had taken it in.

he points out that the cars being scrapped are very rarely the old bangers on the road but good often low mileage but old cars that have been looked after. People who run the bangers cannot afford to replace them with new cars. the owner of the garage actually refused to let one car go thru scrappage, it was a mint toyota starlet with 30k on the clock, the 1st the dealership had ever sold.

so i wonder how many other good motors that have been lost

We're in the middle of scrappaging my wife's '99 Fiat Punto - it's been accepted and we've got about another month before the new car turns up. We've had this from new, it's done about 120K, has just passed another MOT with no serious problems and is / has been rock solid reliable.

Problem is that even with a new MOT it's worth about £250 on the open market but £2000 px'd against a new car - that we were going to buy anyway. The MOT tester had the same reaction as you when we told him why we needed it tested but what do you do faced with numbers like that?

The money we save will be needed to pay all those higher taxes that'll be arriving soon :(

This scrappage scheme makes me sick. I don't own a car yet I have to heavily subsidise car factories and carowners. I don't like handing over my money for such people.:thumbdown::censored:

it seems alot of the industry don't like the scheme either, but it can work well for those in position so i don't blame people for taking it up

it only benefits those that can afford or finance a new car, the government gives 1k and the manufacturer / dealer makes it up to 2k so you could probabily get that 1k anyway

but my concern here was the loss of good vehicles such as the quoted landcruiser and by all accounts alot of other classics and good vehicles have gone too.

he's going to keep a lookout for any more cruisers/hiluxes

Agreed.We had an MG Midget in for MOT a couple of months ago.It was a decent car,not like some or the rot box MGs that you see.The owner only wanted an MOT on it so he could send it for scrappage.

I have a thirteen year old shed of a Mondeo,it's probably worth about £400.It would be worth £2000 for scrappage but I do not want and cannot afford a new car,what good is the scheme to me?

Why oh why oh why do cars have to be SCRAPPED under this scheme? Surely for some vehicles - like the ones you have talked about - the scheme should allow them to be sold, either overseas or to people who want them in the UK.

This wouldn't stop the scheme from working - what difference does it make to a customer whether their old car is scrapped or sold? All that matters to the customer is being able to take an old car to a garage and p/ex it for £2000 of the price of a new one. In some cases the s/h value for selling a car on would exceed the scrap value and make the scheme more economic in any case. France, for eg, has been selling its old cars to Francophone North Africa, rather then scrapping them, for years.

It's because the scheme is supposedly designed as a green initiative to get older more polluting cars off the road, and not just as a stimulus package to encourage people to buy new cars. I agree with you though, in some cases it would be better if some of the cars weren't scrapped, case in point the MG and Toyota above. And that's before we even get into the huge amount of pollution generated in making a new car.

France has actually been running a very similar scrappage scheme introduced well before the current economic situation and very much about removing more polluting vehicles. The cars are scrapped/recycled, not just sold off to some developping nation, it's about removing the pollution, not just exporting it.

I entirely agree with you. We're replacing a car that does 40mpg with one that does 45mpg, an improvement that hardly registers in pollution terms. We would have p/x'd the car in the usual way last year but waited to see if our son wanted it. He's now gone to uni in central London, somewhere a car is the last thing you need so when the scrappage scheme came along it was an offer we couldn't refuse.

If pollution was the only consideration it would have been more logical to keep the 40mpg Fiat and scrap my 25mpg 1969 Lotus Elan, or if I really wanted to save the planet they should be crushing my 20mpg 1970 Kawasaki H1 500. Not only does it drink petrol, it also blots out the road with oil smoke as you accelerate - a real polluter. (Good job I got a "dispensation" for it from a bike enthusiast green party rep when they canvassed my street to talk global warming back in the summer.) However, though I'm happy to do my bit to save the planet there's not much chance that I'm going to get rid of a £15K Lotus rather than a £250 Fiat. It's a pity about the Fiat though. It's a car with a fair bit of life left but not much value and that's what counts the way the scrappage scheme has been set up.

nothing is for free
 

What a shame and a sham this is. People are being tricked into what seems like a good deal. It is nothing to do with saving the planet and all to do with selling new cars. So if you join the scheme you lose, firstly remember no one gives anything away, so you are not getting £2000 for your old car. its on the price in the first place. Second when you drive your new car out of the showroom you loose £2000 of its value!
Also it keeps the second hand market free of cars under £2000 so you cant buy your son or daughter a cheap first car. It also replaces easy to fix cars with not easy to fix cars. Think about it before you do it you will pay in the end, look further than your nose. keep your old car and your money.

Graeme

Another UK Government 'panic attack'. how much from the sales of new cars stay in the UK?
But then again, how much in child benefits also go abroad? :(

The USA has (had) a plan just like it used it few times "cash for clunkers" it is called we lost a lot of fine cars that way. The government use it as "a way to go green" it is not if they care about green just out law low mpg cars and have done with it. What the plans job is is to get people to spend money and drive more tax in to the government. Grate for the well off and and government and dose nothing to help the poor and out of work. Keep the lower class poor it makes the middle class work harder.

Think if they gave the cars that are going to be scraped to the poor helping them out just a bit or sold them for half price to people that can use a good used car.

Dam foolish if you think about it but that is the way governments are. Do not seem to matter who runs them dose it?

It's not quite the same but it reminded me of when they have a "weapons amnesty" The idea being that all the thugs can hand in their min-uzis, 9mm semi-autos, knives, etc at a Police Station and these weopons will be "off the street"

What actually happens is Old Mary Higginbottom hands in her dead husband's fine collection of vintage english shotguns and the Luger he took of an SS Officer during the war. These then get paraded in the media along with a handfull of air fifles to prove to us how safe we all are becuse of this Government's initiative.

If anyone believes that scrapping a perfectly good 10 year old Volvo or that series-one Land Rover that has been in the family since it was new, saves the plannet or that you really are getting £2000 off the price of a new car, then you are sadly mistaken.


Rant over.

Again, no problems with any of that. A year or two down the road there is going to be a shortage of entry level cars and prices for those that are left will rise. In our particular case our son used the Fiat mentioned above to pass his test and our daughter still has a couple of years to go before she's old enough to start driving. We did consider keeping it for her but she's such a cantankerous little madam that she's told us where to stick it. Children eh!

On the economics of this I agree that the scrappage money isn't as wonderful as it first seems. Allow for the normal discounts / special offers and all the other marketing devices that the motor trade use to get us through the door and probably 2/3 of the money has gone. But because of the nature of my wife's job / tax allowances etc we were going to have to buy a new(er) car anyway and the scheme has just made us do it now - at a time when sales are down- rather than later. Which is exactly what the scheme was intended to do. I do feel a bit manipulated by it and various other gov schemes designed to keep us "on message" - don't drink, take exercise etc but that's a topic for another time.

Still no lifetime costs/pollution figures either. If we take an existing 40 MPG car/MZ/Kawa H1 and put it in working condition using a few new bits of rubber the total pollution over the next ten years is the result of making those bits, plus burning the oil. To scrap the clunker adds a big pile of schredded plastic that need to be buried, we use a lot of electricity to make the new vehicle and then start using fuel a slightly lower rate to claw back the difference. I'm betting the nett gain is negative if the old vehicle is good enough to pass an MOT. We should be repairing our old vehicles until major components start to fail, not scrapping all that work because it's an old shape.

If that is the case they've just given X-million to the car manufacturers.

Andy

This is one of my pet hates about the whole "carbon footprint" concept. We have to put mountains of insulation into the houses we work on to meet energy saving targets. But how much energy is used to dig some rocks out of the ground then melt them so they can be made into canyfloss for loft insulation ? The new multi-foil insulations must be worse, aluminium foil, foamed polythene, synthetic felt and more aluminium.

Drive past your local pub though and it's got 10 5kw ifra-red heaters outside so the smokers can go outside in shirt sleaves when it's minus five. One of our customers has got an out-door pool that he heats all year round. The boiler (just for the pool) is 180,000 btu. ( my 3 bed house manages on 50,000 )