The person who calculated this bit of information went to high school in Pittsburgh , Pa. He is now & has been a professor at The University of West Virginia in Morgantown , West Virginia for the last forty some years. I never looked at the clunker program in such depth.

Clunker Math

Think of it this way: A clunker that travels 12,000 miles a year at 15 mpg uses 800 gallons of gas a year. A vehicle that travels 12,000 miles a year at 25 mpg uses 480 gallons a year. So, the average Cash for Clunkers transaction will reduce US gasoline consumption by 320 gallons per year. They claim 700,000 vehicles so that's 224 million gallons saved per year. That equates to a bit over 5 million barrels of oil. 5 million barrels is about 5 hours worth of US consumptio n. More importantly, 5 million barrels of oil at $70 per barrel costs about $350 million dollars So, the government paid $3 billion of our tax dollars to save $350 million.

We spent $8.57 for every dollar we saved.

I'm pretty sure they will do a great job with our health care, though.

Yes, but because this program was under the black Jesus aka: Obama, this info has been swept under the rug. If Bush had put that program into effect it would be all over the news etc. This program was one of many massive failures by this turd in the White House.

My friend owns a small corner used car lot. The cars they crushed were the type he sells. There was (still is?) a huge shortage of cheap used cars and it almost put him out of business.

AKA, dropping dollars to pick up nickels...

Also, they took alot , I mean ALOT of parts for rebuilding out of the 'stream'....

very shortsighted to take tomorrows business and put it in todays...

The only parts that couldn't be resold were the engines. Don't get me wrong, I thought the whole plan was bad from the start. Similar scrapping plans had been tried at smaller levels before and showed little or no benefit. Back to original subject of parts, there is a local u-pull yard here in WI that had row after row of C4C cars that were available for part scrounging. Some of them I was supprised at the good condition they were in. Anyway, we can only hope that they don't try it again!

And made it harder on lower income people to buy good(and 90% we took in where) used cars and engines, etc.
Once it was over, sales wher back to same as before.

Here's an interesting analysis:
http://stason.org/TULARC/vehicles/gasoline-faq/5-14-What-are-gross-polluters.html

It looks like repairing older cars is still the cheapest and best solution.

Interesting fact is the only people that benefitted from this program was people who needed no help at all. Now we have people driving bigger POS on the road because the car they could afford is now gone. I heard through the grape vine dealers were taking any car in on the clunker program even if it got great mpg or was newer. Bad deal all the way around. But hey what you expect from a failing government.

Another intersting fact that Edmunds reported is that the government spent $24,000 to generate each "incremental" sale of a new car.