Is the cash gone in the Cash for Clunkers program?
On Friday morning, with the answer to that question unclear, Atlanta auto dealers were having to make hard decisions whether to continue to make deals with customers trying to trade their old gas guzzlers in for as much as a $4,500 cash from the government program that had $1 billion set aside to re-emburse dealers who made the trades.
“If you ask me what’s going on this morning, what’s going on is confusion,” said Fred Brillanti, the owner of Landmark Chrysler Dodge Jeep in Morrow, Ga. “Last night the National Automobile Dealers Association said the money had run out. This morning they said it hadn’t run out.”
According to press reports the program, in less than a week, had burned through $950 million of the $1 billion fund that the Obama administration anticipated would last until November.
Friday the administration said the program would continue while Congress scrambled to find additional money to fund it.
Still, dealers fear they won’t get reimbursed if they make a deal Friday because so many payouts are already in the pipeline the money is gone, and they’re on the hook for as much as $4,500.
Atlantan Steve Rayman, who owns 13 car dealerships across the country, said his dealers have made clunker trades but he has “never advertised it because I was never sold on the program,” but, if customers came into his Chevrolet dealership in Cobb County Friday “we’ll make a clunker deal.”
But not without trepidation.
“We’re not sure if they will go through and we’ll get the money back from the government,” he said.
Brillanti said his two dealerships, in Morrow, and Athens, have made about 45 clunker deals since last Saturday, and, as word got out that the program was running out of money fast, customers have been pouring in. “The program has been huge for volume,” he said.
Yet, on Friday morning, asked what he would do if a customer came in trying to trade in a clunker, Brillianti joked: “At this very moment we’re going to give them a cup of coffee and hold on for about 10 minutes.”
Brillanti and Rayman said most dealers still have the clunkers on their lots and have not injected the engines, as mandated by the program, with chemical that essentially kills the car by seizing up the engine, until they’ve been re-embursed by the program.
