The Scrappage Scheme.

[pistonpopper]

In my other thread, Twelve Cars In A Year, found in the Readers Rides section on this forum i have been trying to buy a car per month, through out the year. Therefore i have been searching for all manner of cars from the past that for whatever reason i wanted to own at the time. I'm not talking about anything ridiculously hard, and expensive to find like classic cars from the fifties or sixties, or even the seventies. What i was looking for were cars from my youth, cars from the eighties and nineties. This has proved to be very difficult. I can find cars from the eighties and nineties obviously, but the specific cars that i want have at the moment eluded me. So far of the six cars that i have so far purchased this year for this project i have not managed to get any from the eighties, only three from the nineties, and the others unfortunately are from this side of the millenium, a fact that was pointed out by another forum memeber as not being very retro, which is a fair enough comment i think. So i sit here browsing for various cars on various websites, but without luck for the ones that i had hoped to find, and to be honest, they're all cars that were EVERYWHERE during the eighties and nineties. But where are all the mk1 Vauxhall Carlton estates, Alfa Romeo 164s, Fiat Stradas, Talbot Tagoras, mk1 Renault Espaces, to name but a few? Ofcourse, rust will have claimed a good few by now, the Alfas, Fiats, and Talbots would've all be trying to dissolve before they even left the showroom forecourt. But when i was a kid in the eighties and nineties i remember still seeing quite a lot of sixties and seventies cars about, and infact my friends and I at the time had no trouble in finding Cortinas, Escorts, Vivas, Cavaliers, Alpines, Minis etc from the sixties and seventies. So, why is it so much harder to find 20 to 30 year old cars now? My feeling is that the fault lays with the Scrappage Scam sorry, Scheme!

The Vehicle scrappage scheme was a vehicle scrappage scheme that was introduced in the 2009 UK Budget to encourage the citizens of Great Britain to purchase a new car or van and scrap their beautiful old car that they have owned for more than 12 months. This scheme was then extended in September 2009 and again in February 2010 and it's reign of terror finally finished at the end of March 2010. The government agreed to provide a £1,000 payment towards the purchase of a new car ordered from participating manufacturers after 23 April 2009 and first registered on or after 16 May 2009 to the people of Great Britain who also scrap a car that they have owned for more than 12 months and which was older than 10 years, and be in a roadworthy condition with a current MOT!! The new car manufactures agreed to also provide £1,000 off the list price. So suddenly your £500, ten or so year old car became worth £2000 on the dealers forecourt. From an economic standpoint you would've been a fool not to take this offer up at the time. Although, sadly for us good people of this parish, it's not so good, as the pickings have become even slimmer than they would've been through natural causes (rust etc.)! The result of this scheme was that sales of new cars went up with the latter half of 2009 showing a 21% increase over the appalling 2008 figures. By the time Britain's big experiment with state-subsidised car buying officially ended in March 2010, over 392,000 beautiful cars had been crushed, but obviously over 392,000 new cars had been sold. The Koreans benefitted the most from the £400m provided from the UK tax payers from the government, Hyundai being the over all winner, selling 47,000 new cars through the scheme, while fellow Koreans Kia made 33,000 sales. It is fair to say that while the UK taxpayers provided £400 million to fund this scheme, the sales in new cars generated an estimated £700 million revenue thanks to VAT being collected on each one of the new cars sold. Again, from an economic stand point this is good, good for business, good for the economy, and apparently, good for the enviroment, although from what i believe creating a new car creates more pollution than an old car will ever cause in it's life span, but thats an argument for another time.



While plenty benefited including, rather obviously, those that got themselves a nice shiny new car, the fallout from the Scrappge Scheme is of course fewer treasures for all of us, as sadly all the cars that were taken under this scheme had to be  scrapped, and crushed and no models could be sold on or used for spares. As a result of this, thousands of cars that would now be sitting in our collections are missing in action, including no doubt the Carlton i am looking for (^^ in the photo^^) one of 130 Vauxhall Carltons to have fallen to the cause! But worse than that about 20,000 Fiestas were scrapped, including one with just 14,000 miles on the clock, and in near-mint condition. This original model was crushed to save some cash on a new Ford Ka of all things! More than 400 Minis were also destroyed as were 450 old Land Rovers and even 100 Porsches were scrapped! Nothing was sacred, even a 2002 BMW, which would be worth a fortune now was scrapped. More than 30 Ford Capris were also scrapped along with hundreds of Jaguars. Rare American muscle cars like the Chevrolet Camaro and Chevrolet Corvette also got crushed. Even the ever popular Morris Minor couldn't be saved with almost 100 of them turned into baked bean cans! The madness went on and on, with Renault Feugos, Audi Quattros, Mercedes SECs, Alfa Romeo Spiders, Lancia Intergrales, Fiat X1/9s, so on and so fourth all being turned into soup cans with no thought of being able to save them for posterity! It would've been a fight to keep many of these cars from dissolving as it was without adding a government sponsored culling! When the government introduced the scheme they really should've included a loophole where these cars could be saved and restored but there wasn't, it was just madness! This is, sadly why we can't find the models we lusted after when we were too young to afford them, and this is also why when we do find them, (like the humble Escort, with nearly 8000 of them getting lost to the cause!) the price of them is just phenomenal!



Strangly only 24 Talbots succumbed to the Scrappage Scheme, and out of those 24 none were Alpines. Presumably most of the Talbots from the seventies and eighties had already been reclaimed by nature before the scam was introduced in 2009!

[MK2VR6]

The crappage scheme, whilst not helping the situation, isn't to blame. The fault lies much closer to home - it's our attitudes towards cars as disposable tools. As long as a large percentage of the populous continue to keep up with the Joneses, don't repair and maintain their own cars and are prepared to sign up for finance on new cars, the value of anything 10+ years old will continue to be negligible. Nothing's changed. As for not being able to source cars from the 70s easily, where have you been looking and what is your budget? There are still some real bargains to be had with Vauxhall, Austin and Rootes group from this era, to name but a few. When you quote cars like Tagora and Strada, it seems to me that you're trying to make your task ridiculously difficult before you've even started?

[colnerov]

Hi, Yes it's our attitude towards cars now as being disposable and broken for just a few components and how many Carlton,s have been broken for their gearbox to put modern engines in rear wheel drive classic cars?

Colin

[Rob M]

The real reason is ability to go out, slap £500 down on a new car and pay £120 odd a month for it.
That, essentially, killed off the banger market.
Before the major maunfacturers came up with option type schemes you had to put down a sizeable deposit on a new car.
The game changer came about, IIRC, in the late 80s when, I think, Ford where one of the first to offer a buyer a very low deposit and low monthly payments with a lump sum to pay at the end, hand the car back and walk away or change it for another new car and carry on as before.
That was then compounded by the, relatively, low prices for cars and the fact that new cars were suddenly bloody big and a 'small car' like a new Clio/Fiesta had as much interior space as an old MK3 Cortina and would be perfectly good family car fodder.
Now you can buy a Billy Basic Dacia for about £6000. That's a NEW Renault for £6000 with warranty, no MOT for three years and, well, its like the condom of the motoring world, you may lose a bit of feeling and involvement driving it but its 99.99% worry free rogering motoring.
Its pretty much killed off keeping older cars on the road.

[MK2VR6]

Jul 12, 2015 15:35:25 GMT Rob M said:

its like the condom of the motoring world, you may lose a bit of feeling and involvement driving it but its 99.99% worry free rogering motoring.
Its pretty much killed off keeping older cars on the road.

I almost spat out my apple! True though.

[slackerTHEpinstriper]

Too many words!!!!!

[Biscuit]

All good points. And all sadly, true.

[pistonpopper]

Jul 12, 2015 12:08:51 GMT MK2VR6 said:

The crappage scheme, whilst not helping the situation, isn't to blame. The fault lies much closer to home - it's our attitudes towards cars as disposable tools. As long as a large percentage of the populous continue to keep up with the Joneses, don't repair and maintain their own cars and are prepared to sign up for finance on new cars, the value of anything 10+ years old will continue to be negligible. Nothing's changed. As for not being able to source cars from the 70s easily, where have you been looking and what is your budget? There are still some real bargains to be had with Vauxhall, Austin and Rootes group from this era, to name but a few. When you quote cars like Tagora and Strada, it seems to me that you're trying to make your task ridiculously difficult before you've even started?

Jul 12, 2015 15:35:25 GMT Rob M said:

The real reason is ability to go out, slap £500 down on a new car and pay £120 odd a month for it.
That, essentially, killed off the banger market.
Before the major maunfacturers came up with option type schemes you had to put down a sizeable deposit on a new car.
The game changer came about, IIRC, in the late 80s when, I think, Ford where one of the first to offer a buyer a very low deposit and low monthly payments with a lump sum to pay at the end, hand the car back and walk away or change it for another new car and carry on as before.
That was then compounded by the, relatively, low prices for cars and the fact that new cars were suddenly bloody big and a 'small car' like a new Clio/Fiesta had as much interior space as an old MK3 Cortina and would be perfectly good family car fodder.
Now you can buy a Billy Basic Dacia for about £6000. That's a NEW Renault for £6000 with warranty, no MOT for three years and, well, its like the condom of the motoring world, you may lose a bit of feeling and involvement driving it but its 99.99% worry free rogering motoring.
Its pretty much killed off keeping older cars on the road.

I had not thought of it like that, i still don't think of cars as disposable, but you're right, and infact i was at a barbeque earlier where this very point was emphasized by the age differences in the group. A friend of mine has a son who is just learning to drive, and was talking about buying his first car. So i offered him my lovely Citroën AX for the bargain price of just £500. Why would i want that he said. So i sadi it's a nice little car to get out there and blezz about, have some fun and learn about motoring in. No he said, i'm gonna buy a brand new car, and all his mates agreed with him that buying a brand new car is the way to go,and the only way. So i said, yeah, thats fine, but it'll cost him a fortune, get knocked about and by the time he's finished paying it off it'll be worthless, then waht will he do? He said that he would just chuck it away, and get another brand new car! And once again all his late teen/early twenty year old mates agreed with him, that this is the way forward. Funny thing is, looking at the parked cars in the street outside my mates house, all the older cars belonged to the older members of the group, and all the brand new cars belonged to the kids! When i was young it was the other way around lol!

As for the whole keeping up with the Joneses, i've never been that type of fella, but recently it was decided by my brothers wife that the old Mundano was, at fifteen years old, a bit long in the tooth. There was nothing wrong with it, it was MOTd, and in a good driveable shape, and condition, but just old. They don't have a lot of spare cash, so i offered my slightly newer Jaguar to them, which my brother liked the idea of, but my brothers wife was against the idea, and so they took out a fairly big loan, and bought a three year old Renault Scenic. This i don't understand because, she doesn't drive, and most of the time when i go up there, theres not even food in the cupboards because they're not made of money apparently. But they can afford to buy a three year old Renault Scenic like most of their friends and neighbours drive... Wierd! Their friends and neighbours must think i'm a right old hill billy when i pull up in my old Talbot!

Now you can buy a Billy Basic Dacia for about £6000. That's a NEW Renault for £6000 with warranty, no MOT for three years and, well, its like the condom of the motoring world, you may lose a bit of feeling and involvement driving it but its 99.99% worry free rogering motoring. Rob M, now thats gotta be one of the funniest things i've read in ages!

I didn't say that i was not able to source cars from the 70s easily MK2VR6, I can, and i look all over the place for them, the problem is, the ones i can find are not the ones i want, as i said i want cars like the mk1 Vauxhall Carlton estate, Alfa Romeo 164, Fiat Strada, Talbot Tagora, mk1 Renault Espace, to name but a few, and I see little point in buying a car that i'm not particularly interested in because it's available. For example the Talbot Tagora was made from 1980 to 1983, and was Talbots exectutive saloon. Tonight i typed into ebay 1982, and one of the things that came up was a Granada, which was Fords Exectuve saloon. I could afford it, even though i feel it was wildly over priced, but what would be the point? It wouldn't give me the experience i'm after, and that would be the experience of driving a Tagora. I'm even sure that the Granada would be a better car, but it's not the right car for me. Likewise a Golf wont do when i'm looking for a Strada, this may well come back to bite me in the bum soon! I realise like you say that this is making hard work of it all, but like i said, what's the point of owning a car that you don't really want because you can't find the one you want? As for my budget, i must admit i have problems with some cars apparent worth. I have a friend who is happy to spend £20k on a mk1 Escort Mexico, and i just wouldn't do that because i feel that they're just not worth that amount of money, although they obvioulsy are as he's had a couple now and made money on both of them. I would do, and have done before £20k on the right car, but it wasn't on anything like an Escort. I just can't justify that kind of expense, to me, i look at them wrongly, i still look at them as a £500 car, like they were when i was a lad, and to be fair, i remember going in them when i was a lad, and i thought that they were curse word. My mate had a very nice mk2 RS2000, and it was ok, but my Brothers A series Manta was far better, but i wouldn't spend £20k on that either! Perhaps i am actually the Ebeneezer Scrouge of motoring!

[southside]

There was a topic about this on TV a few months back, sure it was on BBC news. Apparently there is more 70's cars still on UK roads than 80's cars.

They put it down to the fact that 60's/70's cars "looked" like classics so we're more desirable where as 80's/90's cars were so bland and modern looking that most are overlooked unless it was something special.

[colnerov]

Hi, yes because of manufacturers pursuit of low drag co-efficient car they all ended up looking the same, 'jellymould' or 'euroboxes' were the nicknames at the time. One of the fellow motor traders used to buy and sell cars as well as doing mechanical and bodywork, For fun would de-badge or change badges around from car to car. It was surprising the amount of people including car dealers who would come round and not notice or start talking about the 'wrong' car.

Colin

[paul99]

Nods to the above, but would add that given the cost of insurance for the younger drivers, the 'free' insurance offered on some new cars would be a factor. When my now partner was looking for her first car, a new Ka worked out cheaper with free insurance than a used one without.....

[nomad]

I've just stumbled on an older write-up from one of the scrappage scam graveyards, some sad but epic photies
www.28dayslater.co.uk/r-a-f-thurleigh-car-graveyard-april15.t95528

[93fxdl]

Another reason later cars are becoming scarce is an industry practice called "inbuilt obsalessence" where a product becomes unviable to keep, because the parts to service/repair become more expensive than the item is worth.
Vehicles used to get killed by rust, then ecu problems became a killer, the modern executioner seems to be management warning lights, so you have a 10 year old car that is worth say 500, warning light comes on, do you spend 50 an hour on garage rates, plus assorted sensors at 50 up each.
Certainly people here would fix, but joe public would just chop it in.
It's not just cars, my parents had a tumble drier with a failed timer, a replacement timer was only a few pounds less than a new drier.
Ttfn Glenn

[nomad]

^ whs

We had/have a tidy (posh ) Peugoet 206, lots of extras - including about 4 warning lights that come on when they want.
1 is for the cat, diagnostics show "cat is nearing end of life" but emissions are fine so it's just an early warning. try explaining that to a buyer or mot chap.
another is brakes - 206s have a known weak handbrake switch, so the light comes on even if brakes are new & perfect...

madness but the car is scrap value as it's too expensive / time-consuming to fix the warning lights

[ratchart]

If nobody bought new cars:

1) All the factories would close and the workers would be on the dole. 

2) Income tax would have to go up to 80%, probably.

3) All the old car would eventually become VED exempt thus other taxes would have to go up even more to compensate.

4) The existing old cars would become more expensive. Good news for the sellers not so much for the buyers.

5) Some old cars would still need to be scrapped because of crashes, terminal rust etc so the amount of cars would decrease. therefore further increase the value of the remaining ones. 

6) Used car dealers would now be cock-a-hop having a control of an ever decreasing resource in a seller's market.

7) All the umemployed ex car workers become mime artists, human statues and other annoying types of street performer's (those guys with the diablo thing) to make ends meet and possibly scrape together the ten thousand pounds for a 1991 Hyundai.

8) All the people who now can't afford a used car have to use public transport. Overcrowded busses now cause gridlock in every town in Britain.

9) The planet of the apes eventually.

[kabman]

I get this all the time at work. 'There's a fault with the MIL' (malfunction indicator lamp)

No there isn't. The light is doing what it should do and showing there is one or other sensor outside it's expected operating range. People then either delete the fault codes but complain they keep recurring or throw sensors at the car hoping that it'll fix it, eventually giving up when it doesn't saying there must be a fault with the light or the ECU. Nine times out ten it's a wiring fault and most of the rest are due to dirt/corrosion/air leaks/catalyst damage.

I've seen hundreds of thousands of pounds (I wouldn't be surprised if it was millions) worth of perfectly good parts replaced under warranty because of this. And yes, dealers are the worst - they aren't paying for the parts so they don't care.

Sorry for the rant - here's a few pics of a nice (scrappage unrelated) 911 as recompense.

[93fxdl]

Jul 29, 2015 11:01:29 GMT ratchart said:

If nobody bought new cars:

1) All the factories would close and the workers would be on the dole. 

2) Income tax would have to go up to 80%, probably.

3) All the old car would eventually become VED exempt thus other taxes would have to go up even more to compensate.

4) The existing old cars would become more expensive. Good news for the sellers not so much for the buyers.

5) Some old cars would still need to be scrapped because of crashes, terminal rust etc so the amount of cars would decrease. therefore further increase the value of the remaining ones. 

6) Used car dealers would now be cock-a-hop having a control of an ever decreasing resource in a seller's market.

7) All the umemployed ex car workers become mime artists, human statues and other annoying types of street performer's (those guys with the diablo thing) to make ends meet and possibly scrape together the ten thousand pounds for a 1991 Hyundai.

8) All the people who now can't afford a used car have to use public transport. Overcrowded busses now cause gridlock in every town in Britain.

9) The planet of the apes eventually.

Would that be a bit like Cuba?
As far as the manufacturers are concerned, once the warranty expires its no longer their concern. But every day it continues is another day where they don't sell a New one. There is a famous light bulb, which has lasted for decades, but as far as the manufacturer is concerned, it is faulty
Ttfn Glenn

[lord13]

A point mentioned earlier, about young people buying new cars, in my opnion they are literally 'forced' into it financially.
the reason is simple, insurance.

My son, 17, has just got his provisional, so we had a trawl through ebay to find cheap cars for him....

plenty of cheap affordable cars to be had, corsa's, astra's fiesta's etc for around £100 - £200, all with a bit of mot ideal first cars.

we checked insurance on all of these, and found prices ranging from £2500 - £9000!!!!
£9000!!! what the hell??? for a £200 quid banger?, i knew insurance was going to be a killer but jeez....

so anyway, we then put in some older cars, viva's escorts, cortina's etc... and had some surprising results, i actually put in the details of my first car, a vauxhall viva, and the best quote was :
17 year old, on a provisional that has been held for only one month, sole driver, fully comp on a 1969 viva HB - £520
wow....shame i didn't have the viva anymore....
Unfotunately, to get a road worthy viva that would be ok for everyday use for my son would cost around £2000, way above our budget, same goes for an escort, or cortina.

So, the choice for young people and driving is, buy a 15 - 20 year old banger for £200 and get stung on the insurance, or get a £2000 - £4000 loan out to buy something they can insure for pennies... either way they have a few grand to pay out...

So instead they go to the dealers, chuck a couple of hundred quid down and walk away with a fully insured, fully taxed, and in some cases free fuel for a year, depending on the gimmick/hook/etc, and only pay £150 - £200 a month for their motor...

Also, new cars, even the small 1.2 engined ones , are faster and smoother and easier to drive, which makes new drivers so much more dangerous...
Think back to when you passed your test and got your first car, mine struggled to reach 60mph, i thrashed the off it, as you do, but my 'country road rallies' wouldn't have topped 50 mph and my 'traffic light dragstrip' efforts only got me upto 40 mph before the next set of lights most of the time (1159cc viva, 0-60 time of about a week) but i had fun , without too much risk
Now consider todays cars that new drivers get...
even 1.2 corsa's have a 0-60 time that shames my old viva, and young kids with zero experience are ragging round in 150bhp+ euroboxes without a care in the world.....

and this is why when i, at 43 years young, pulled into a parking spot in tesco in my 1994 astra gls the other day, and glanced over at the fairly new audi that pulled in next to me i noticed it was driven by a lad of what looked to be around 19 - 20...

so if you could have the choice between a 1300 old banger or 2.0 litres of germanic cruise missile as your first car which would you have chose?

ok i went off topic a bit ... but who would buy an old car as their first car with these sort of incentives?

[93fxdl]

As the tagora is on your hitlist, I had a look on how many left, grand total of 9, cannot say it was ever a common car, I cannot remember ever seeing one on the road, and now the chances of ever seeing one are really slim, as all 9 are sorn
Ttfn Glenn
Ps less than 200 Alfa 164 left
38 fiat stradas

[Raoul Duke]

I do know of at least three in-use Tagoras in the UK. Neither of the owners would even consider selling, mind.