The think that kills me about the cash for clunkers program is that the ‘poor’ people who don’t have credit or can’t afford payments that really got laid open in the deal. The next words to come out of my head will be about how I would have executed, excuse me, I mean orchestrated it!
First I want to cover a few interesting facts that should be considered. One of my cars is a 1995 Buick Roadmaster Station Wagon. It has the 5.7L or 350 cid GM/Buick Cop Car engine. Meaning it has a more performance oriented camshaft and tuned port fuel injection. I joke you not, It will give a Dodge Magnum ‘Hemi’ a run for it’s money, down right striking fear and anxiety in the heart of a person who spent a small fortune to go fast, and an old station wagon is putting him down.
That is irrelevant, i just wanted to say that. Here is what I see. The factory in many case inflated the Highway and City MPG (miles per gallon) ratings for the public. So basically when the car was new, the suggested HWY/City MPG ratings were exaggerated (imagine that?) somewhat. It all looked good to the consumers, but realistically speaking, rarely did a car live up to the factory MPG ratings.
So what we have here is a bunch of cars that never get better than 18 MPG, but were rated at perhaps 21 MPG by the factory, inflating MPG figures, but unknowingly causing a problem down the road with efforts such as the C4C program.
My Buick wagon with the 5.7L engine is rated at 21 MPH highway, it’s hard to believe that a 6000 pound lead sled, almost as along as my full length beautiful 1988 collector worthy GMC pickup is, can get that mileage. It does on the highway, if I drive at 75 Mph with the cruise on, it gets 21 mph on the highway and 17 to 18 MPG in the city. That is darn good mileage for a tremendous, large engine car.
Here is what bothers me. My sister and my Brother in Law both have new Toyota Sienna vans.
Last year my wife and I rented a Sienna van to go from Florida to Maryland to see my parents and other family members (especially the nieces and nephew). We decided to rent a van because we wanted a vehicle that got better than 21 MPH on the highway, and we did not want to put the mileage on our 2000 GMC Safari van. We figured a new Sienna would have all the room we needed for our two dogs, one is 95 lbs and the other is 65 lbs. and give us better fuel mileage. If you remember gas was about 4 dollars a gallon last year.
We packed the Sienna and took off, it is very roomy and fairly comfortable, but very much to our dismay it would not get better than 22 MPG at 75 mph. This was quite perplexing to us. Here we rented a new hi tech van that is supposed to save fuel, and low and behold it did not get any better mileage than our older lower tech vehicles.
When I questioned my Sister and Brother in law, both said,” that’s about what we get”. And BTY, they were none too happy about the relatively poor fuel mileage too. Since they both own them, it bothers the heck out of them. Personally, I thought our GMC van drives better too, since it is actually on a truck chassis platform, and not a reinforced car chassis platform.
Part of my point is, take heed of fuel mileage ratings, they often lie. The bottom line here is that we decided this is a bunch of muckeypuck. Essentially poor mileage in a vehicle claimed to get good mileage and be comfy. It failed. So there may be a lot of people out there with GMC Sierra Vans, (not Sienna Vans), Buick Roadmasters and other cars considered to be clunkers of some sort that really perform well and have acceptable emissions when tuned properly.
Do your research first if you have to buy a new car, go for it. If you can’t or don’t want to, you can decide to buy a somewhat modernized rebuilt engine and improve your gas mileage, performance and emission’s of your current car very effectively. We will keep our van, not go into debt and when the engine fails, I’ll buy an updated rebuilt engine from GotEngines.com @ 1-877-268-0664.
[...] my truck is classified as a clunker), to have up to 4500.00 dollars credit toward rebuilding the clunker engines and doing things like using ” hi gas mileage” camshafts, and installing more fuel [...]