What a shame. What a crying flippin’ shame.
I drove through the local VW/Audi dealer’s lot earlier this week, just to see what they’ve got on hand, and saw this gorgeous Burgundrot 735i sitting along the back fence. I’m guessing it’s about a ’91; doesn’t really matter I guess, because this is as close as I’ll get to owning it… It’s a Cash for Clunkers trade in. Even though the bad joke of program is over & done with, seeing this car makes me mad & sad all over again.
Cosmetically, the car is in decent shape. It’s missing a center cap on one of the rear Style 2 wheels, but no big deal there. The tires are in decent shape. The interior looks pretty clean. There’s no rust anywhere that I can see. The undercarriage is very clean. Just looks like a very nicely kept Big Bimmer. The engine & transmission are total unknowns, and might have been huge problems, but with these cars, most any issue aside from rust can be sorted out without much fuss.
But it’s headed for the crusher anyway.
The Cash For Clunkers program was such a stupid idea to begin with… $2.88 billion in taxpayer money (and borrowed money) was dumped into this program in an effort to stimulate the economy by giving a boost to slumped auto sales, and to pull ‘older’ ‘inefficient’ cars off the road, replacing them with newer more fuel efficient cars. At first, the program was funded with a billion dollars, with the idiots in Congress thinking the program would run for a couple of months. When that money ran out in the first week, the program was hailed as a huge success and given another two billion dollars. Interesting how ‘success’ was defined here, as if handing out free money could somehow ‘fail’.
From what I remember of what was said about the program when it was first introduced was that it was primarily meant to help the US automakers, but guess which cars sold the best… Imports. And the short-term impact on the economy was barely perceptible, and still economists wonder whether the meager boost came at the cost of sales that would’ve happened later anyway. And how many of the nearly 700,000 people who took advantage of the program overextended themselves financially & will end up defaulting on their auto loans. The supposed environmental aims of the program were realized, but at what economic cost? Especially when you consider the environmental impact of building a new car and disposing of the old one.
But I’ll set aside the economics and politics of C4C for a moment and focus on one of the things I hate the most about the program; the fact that perfectly serviceable cars — like this 735i — are going to be scrapped. There’s no second chance for them; the title is blackmarked & made ineligible for being resold ever again, and the shell is crushed. Some may have easily salvageable parts pulled and resold by a recycler, but the engines get horked over by having them run until the bearings seize up from the dose of sodium silicate dumped into the crankcase in place of oil. In many cases, the dealers could potentially sell the cars for more than the $4,500 maximum that the previous owner got from the government, but now the dealers can do nothing but sit on their hands waiting for the promised checks to be sent out by the bureaucrats overseeing the program. Makes me wonder how high the opportunity cost would be to the dealers from all that money sitting in limbo. With help like that…
Sorry if I sound bitter about this, but I just hate to see a car as nice as this go to waste. I’ll get over it, but it would at least ease my pain if I could somehow get my hands on the wheels & brakes from this thing; that’d be a nice upgrade for my 528! Ok, now I sound greedy. Guess it’s just the cheapskate dumpster-diver in me.
