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The Cash for Clunkers tally is in, and a lot of people are scratching their heads about both the method employed to keep the units moving and the bribe required to get Americans to spend green.
Cash for Clunkers put a lot of cars in the clunker pile and released a fleet of new wheels for the American highway. Some pundits are challenging Obama to solve every public action initiative this way: spending billions of dollars.
Ford Motor Co. sold 181,826 cars and light trucks compared with 155,117 in August 2008, when high gas prices and growing economic uncertainty kept people away from showrooms. Is Ford the next American automaker on the chopping block? How many trillions will it cost us to keep these dinosaur vehicle manufacturers open?
Two of Ford’s vehicles, the Ford Focus and the Ford Escape, were among the top selling cars under the Cash for Clunkers program. Ford was hardly the automaker looking ahead ten years ago to a day when government rebates would encourage green cars to move to the head of the lot.
Sales of the Ford Focus rose 56 percent while those of the Escape crossover vehicle climbed 49 percent. Maybe someday at Ford, green energy and not dollars will be Job One. But the tinkerers at Ford aren’t the only auto manufacturer breathing life saving oxygen under the mayor’s pardon/reprieve/clunkers program.
Japanese automakers Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor Co. also posted gains year-over-year gains in August. Toyota sales rose 6.4 percent to 225,088, lifted by small cars like the Corolla, the best-selling clunkers vehicle. Toyota and Hondas will be on the road long after kids stop knowing how to spell “Chrysler”.
But if the best-selling car under the clunkers program had been American, then Cash for Clunkers really would have been an American succe.ss story
Honda sales rose 9.9 percent to 161,439, also largely on the strength of its fuel-efficient offerings. But is Honda really the target company the Stimulus led Obama primed clunkers bill was emant to assist?
Meanwhile, low supplies of fuel-efficient vehicles at Chrysler kept the automaker from benefiting more from the clunkers program. For a company with a dismal sales record, there were too few models on the shop floor?
Too bad Chrysler didn’ spend some of that “save us” money putting out new cars, because those Clunker rebates encouraged customers to buy gas misers in exchange for older, clunker, cars with gas mileage of 18 mpg or less.
All in all, the recycling of the clunker cars told the world at large just what would move the mountain of consumers greenward.
More green.
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