The American love affair with gas-guzzling, oversized cars appears to be on the wane, according to figures released recently, with 83% of the top trade-ins under Barack Obama’s administration’s ‘cash for clunkers” scheme being either SUVs or pick-up trucks.
The scheme to boost car sales has been popular, with 316 189 cars worth a total of about $1 326- million turned in the first two weeks.
Statistics provided by the department of transport suggest that Americans are now ditching their SUVs, which reached their peak in popularity in the middle of this decade.
Six of the top 10 trade-ins were SUVs, with two mini-vans and two pick-up trucks rounding off the list. The reject list did not include any saloon model cars.
The scheme, which was designed primarily to boost car sales rather than make America’s roads greener, does not require buyers to make a radical improvement to fuel efficiency in their new cars.
But the administration claimed that the programme was getting the dirtiest vehicles off America’s roads, saying customers were going home from dealerships with new cars that were, on average, 63% less polluting than their old ones.
But environmentalists say it is far from clear whether the scheme will reduce carbon emissions from cars significantly and, even if it does, it is a very costly way to achieve such benefits, at about $500 for each ton of carbon eliminated.
‘We think there will be some emissions reduction but it will just be a very small percentage of emissions from transportation,” said Chris Ganson, a transport analyst at the World Resources Institute (WRI). ‘It’s still just a drop in the bucket.”
A WRI analysis found the scheme would save less than two days’ worth of carbon emissions between now and 2019. The scheme pays customers up to $4 500 to turn in their old vehicle and the replacement vehicle only has to achieve about 1.7km per litre (kpl) improvement on the clunker. Much of the benefit cited by the administration is short term.
New fuel regulations will force carmakers to produce vehicles that get an average of 11.5kpl — more than required by the cash-for-clunkers programme. In addition, the WRI analysis noted that drivers tend to use new cars much more heavily than clunkers.
Even so, there are some encouraging signs of greener car-buying habits because of the sharp spikes in petrol prices in the past few years and more general greening of purchasing patterns.
All but two of the cars on the top 10 list of purchases are saloons and the fourth most popular car bought under the scheme is the hybrid Toyota Prius. —