Cash For Clunkers Comes To An End

Time is up on the government's Cash For Clunkers program. The program began back on July 24th with one billion dollars in funding. Cash For Clunkers provided rebates of up to 45-hundred dollars each for 250-thousand automobile sales. It was so successful the funds were depleted in one week and Congress had to approve an additional 2 billion to keep it alive until Labor Day.
Transportation Secretary Ray Lahood says when it's all added up, as many as 800-thousand vehicles will have been sold as a result of the Cash For Clunkers program… but as the saying goes - you snooze, you lose - which was especially true for those who waited until the last minute to trade in.

Those who waited until the last day to try to take advantage of the government's Cash For Clunkers program were out of luck. Most car salesmen weren't making those deals on Monday.
Mark Medinger, President of Savannah Hyundai explains, "Dealers are processing this huge amount of paperwork in order to get it in and get reimbursed for the money they've given to their customers, so I think that dealers had to cut it off early enough to insure that they could properly file all the paperwork." And there's a lot of it. For every car a dealer sold through the reimbursement program, there were up to 19 separate attachments that had to be sent online to the federal government along with the application itself. Needless to say - that took a lot of time and caused a few problems says Medinger. “The website's gone down several times because they did not estimate the magnitude of all the paperwork surrounding these deals."

Despite the problems, though, most dealers say the program has been great for the automobile industry. "It obviously got a huge amount of exposure for our business and got a lot of customers that might not have been able to afford a new car previously a chance to buy one,” says Medinger. As great as the program was for dealers and for those ready to buy a car over the last few weeks - it could cause some problems for those looking to buy a car in the next few months. Experts say there will be fewer new cars on the lots to choose from...and the price of used cars will likely increase.