Every article says it was bad, but why? And was there any good to it?
In: Economics
That it was bad is mostly revisionist history as told by classic car collectors and DIY repair folk.
It’s definitely true that some rare or hard to find cars got caught in the cross fire, but the majority of the cars that got scrapped were things that hadn’t ran in years.
One of the bad aspects of it was that it removed a lot of potentially good used parts. But one of the realities of that is that many of those “clunkers” were never on the market in the first place. They were just scrap sitting in someone’s backyard rotting. I recall some reports of stolen cars being turned in for the program as well.
There were also quite a few scrappers going around and scamming unknowing folk out of their old “clunkers” that weren’t aware of the program. At the time, there were signs all over the place put up by individuals advertising their “clunker removal” service.
One of the positives was that with so many old cars off the road, the used market shot up making them hard to come by and new car prices also shot up.
If you had to buy a car anytime from late 2020 to early 2023, you’d have experienced something similar with used cars being priced at insane levels and new cars going far above sticker price. That’s kind of how it was then. The supply of cars dropped, demand did not.
It was a successful program for the most part. But it is a shame how many potentially salvageable cars met their demise.
If you want to hear all about how terrible it was, you should ask over on a car forum
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