The
UK scrappage proposal is deeply flawed and counter productive. Consider
this; for the £2000 incentive to be of interest, the customers
existing car must be worth less than that on the open market, now I
ask you how many people with cars of that value are in the market for
a new car? £2000 off the price of an average family car still
puts it out of reach of most people.
But an even more disturbing effect is the distortion in old car values,
rich people (who were going to buy a new car anyway) will buy an old
car for maybe £1000 and cash in the difference. The result is
that all cars under the scrappage value will go up in price, many people
on low incomes rely on cheap cars, often under £1000, and will
be priced off the road. So once again the rich benefit and the poor
suffer.
The third point is that about 90% of cars in the UK are imported, so
this takes yet more UK tax payers money abroad and will increase the
country’s debt.
And as a finisher, older cars are usually driven less and contribute
a much smaller part to the country’s carbon output, as a classic
car owner I have several older cars which hardly get used at all, so
why are these sorts of cars being demonised by the ill-informed government?
As more of the older cars get needlessly crushed there will be less
spare parts available too, driving up cost of ownership and making it
more difficult to preserve our motoring heritage.
Also, older cars are a wonderful resource, Sunderland University recently
converted a car to run on hydrogen using commercially available CNG
equipment, conversions could cost about the same as the scrappage incentive
but would result in zero carbon output cars and mass employment for
the conversion centres, surely that’s a better idea?
So, ditch the stupidity of the scrappage scheme and put the money into
something useful instead.