Date: Sun, 2 Aug 2009 09:36:18 -0700
Reply-To: Jim Arnott <jrasite@EONI.COM>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: Jim Arnott <jrasite@EONI.COM>
Subject: Re: Idiots for Clunkers
In-Reply-To: <86476e250908020731y7644ffd6r3797cad1d8ebb42@mail.gmail.com>
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On Aug 2, 2009, at 7:31 AM, Loren Busch wrote:
> Bad link...
>
New $2 billion in cash for clunkers program gets South Bay dealers
rockin'
The van had been brown once, back before the fall of the Berlin Wall,
but after 23 years on the road, its metal skin had finally melted, so
that it looked as if it had a horrible disease. It had an ugly faded
spot on the driver's door — where somebody smashed into it while
parking, but didn't leave a note — and a long, buckled scrape running
down the length of the 1986 VW Vanagon's right side.
"I bought it new on my son's first birthday," said Ken Arno of
Fremont. "My wife drove it every day. And when my son was old enough,
he drove it."
When potential car buyers like Arno heard that subsidies — up to
$4,500 — were available through the government's "cash for clunkers"
program, they stormed the nation's auto dealerships. And just as the
owners of gas guzzlers burned through the program's $1 billion from
the federal stimulus package, on Friday the House voted to refill its
coffers with an additional $2 billion infusion.
That's when Arno decided that his junker was a clunker, and that he
would take advantage of the popular program.
He called his son Daniel, who recently graduated from college. "When I
told him I was selling it, he hung up on me," Arno recalled Friday,
jacking the van up one final time so he could salvage a set of wheels
he'd recently put on the family's magic bus. "There are a lot of
memories in that van."
(Jim: The son gets it. Dad's an idiot.)
An all-nighter
Before Arno could even begin stripping his van, the House saw a rare
opportunity to do something the American public wouldn't hate them
for, voting 316-109 that morning to add new cash to the clunker rebate
program.
The Senate is expected to take up the legislation next week. Sen. Carl
Levin, D-Mich., said the Obama administration assured lawmakers that
"deals will be honored until otherwise noted by the White House."
President Barack Obama said he was encouraged by lawmakers keeping
alive a program that had "succeeded well beyond our expectations."
No kidding.
At the Toyota dealership on Stevens Creek Boulevard, where Arno had
turned in his van — and where he works as an IT manager — as many as
80 clunkers had come rumbling in during the past week. Most of them
sputtered onto the lot Thursday, when it appeared the program might
die before their engines did.
"We've been going gangbusters," said Geoff Yeager, general sales
manager at Stevens Creek Toyota. "After they announced the program was
going to be suspended, we were here until 2:30 or 3 in the morning,
and had customers waiting in line to get in."
Because "cash for clunkers" is a government program, it requires
massive amounts of paperwork, with 11 different documents that need to
be filled out and scanned before the feds will pay off. "I'm stressed,
tired and in dire need of a massage," said Heather Dea, the Toyota
dealership's customer relations manager.
She worked a normal shift Thursday, went home and put her daughter to
bed, then started working again and kept at it until 2:30 a.m. She was
back at the dealership at 8 a.m. Friday, making sure every document
was perfect. Dea was also desperately trying to get a guy named Jimmy
from sales to give her a neck rub at her desk, but he had run away.
"We just had sexual harassment training last week," she explained
ruefully.
Rockin' and rollin'
Some dealers have complained that the government couldn't keep up with
the thousands of requests for refunds that poured in, and many have
simply refused to take part in the program. "The federal government
can't process a simple rebate," thundered Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich,
one of several House Republicans who blasted the clunker program.
"I've got dealers who have submitted the paperwork three times and
have gotten three rejections. What is a dealer supposed to do?"
Yeager conceded that his dealership has yet to see a dime of the
government's money, which he called "very scary." But he also noted
that his salesmen have sold about 600 cars this month. "We're rockin'
and rollin'," he said. "It feels like the olden days. This would have
been a good solid week back in our heyday. It helped make our July,
and it's going to get us off to a great start in August. I talked to a
couple of people who told me if it wasn't for this program, they were
going to keep driving their 200,000-mile car indefinitely."
There is no way to monitor how many clunkers have been taken off the
road. The government released no figures, and most dealers didn't want
to reveal anything that might be useful to competitors. When Susan and
Kevin Raymond of San Jose went to the Stevens Creek Subaru dealership
Thursday, ready to trade in their 1996 Dodge Ram truck for an Outback,
they spent two hours negotiating with a salesman, then told him they
had a clunker.
"That's when the deal just stopped," Susan Raymond said. "He said,
'We've taken in some cars, and we don't trust that the federal
government is going to give us the money for them.' "
On the Toyota crush lot — behind an abandoned Black Angus, where all
the clunker carcasses were taken before being ground up for scrap —
Ken Arno's van lowered its weary shoulders to the ground, not far from
a Jeep whose vanity plate said R8R FAN. A cream-colored Cadillac STS
still bore an Obama '08 bumper sticker, but it no longer cruised with
the audacity of hope. It just sat there.
