Foreword
Its often brought up in various forums, facebook groups, Twitter threads, etc that Cash for Clunkers is the epoch of our current used car market pricing. To many, this program symbolizes everything wrong with “evil guvernment” and how it was a dirty trick to hurt the lower classes and working man. So lets answer the question with numbers and data, does the fallout from 2008s Cash for Clunkers still really linger to this day?
History
Cash for Clunkers was a program put into place in 2009, with the basic premise of offering incentives to get consumers to trade in an old used car and get credit towards buying a new car. The program had some basic caveats that a car had to meet to be elligable:
Younger than 25 years old (which in 2009 would have made the age limit at 1984)
Combined MPG of 18 or less.
“Driveable” condition.
Now I’m sure certain locations were more or less strict on what “driveable” meant. I wouldn’t have known since I was the ripe age of 12 in 2009, so my concerns with government programs to help the post-recession economy were greatly drowned out by computer games, Xbox live, and generally being a dumb middle schooler.
By the time the program ended, the rough total of vehicles scrapped under this program was just under 700,000. (The real number being a reported 677,081). For this report I am going to ignore the car enthusiast trap of getting upset over “rare” cars being crushed. I have been in and around junkyards and rare obscure cars long enough to know that just becuase something is rare, doesn’t mean the person who owns it cares. I could go on about this, but I think that’s a topic for the end of this story.
The Data
For reference and transparency, the official spreadsheet of this data can be found here:
Additionally all of this data comes directly from the NHTSA page for CFC as archived by the Wayback Machine.
So lets start by breaking down this data into some top level overviews so we can get an understanding of what we are working with:
So the first thing we see is that the number of vehicles classed as Trucks and SUVs make up a significant portion of the data. This tracks given the <18 MPG requirement of the program. However, its worth noting that the way they classified vehicles into the 3 “Truck” categories and the “Passenger Vehicle” category seem to have almost no bearing on the shape of the vehicle. There is everything from Audi wagons to Mercedes coupes in the Truck class, and then F-150 trucks in the Pass. Vehicle class. A better overview is breaking it all down by make/model:
Junkyards
Now, let us do some math to get a very very rough number on how many vehicles are being scrapped per year. Now I want to preface this by saying these are rough estimates, however the results will be quite shocking as they are grossly LOWER than the actual number. The data collected here was calculated with the following:
Data from 8 LKQ “Pull Your Part” Junkyards, all in the South Eastern Coastal area of the US. The data was collected from October 1st to December 30th. Additionally, all this data is available for download. I used a data mining software to collect the Year, Make, Model, VIN, and entry date of every vehicle in each yard.
What we are looking at here is the amount of vehicles that were processed and put out into the yard for customers to pull parts from at each location. All of these are trimmed down to Oct. 1 to Dec. 30th, with some already having removed their early October inventory. I tried to get a coverage of a few months since the number of intake vehicles most likely varies during the year, and I do not have a complete enough data set to cover a years worth of inventory yet.
It is worth noting that LKQ has 70 locations across the United States, with most of their yards being in the south and western parts of the country. I highly doubt that LKQ would release a full dossier of information containing historical intake data, however I am sure the insights of such data would be fascinating to see.
Getting back to the data, we can have Excel calculate that in the roughly 3 month period an LKQ yard sees about 1055 cars. Now lets times that by 4 to cover all 4 quarters of the year and we get 4218 cars per year on average. Now that data is for one yard, and LKQ as a corporation operates 70 “Pull Your Part” locations. So lets multiply that by 70 and our rough yearly average for the LKQ Corp. is 295,260 vehicles.
Folks, that is nearly 300,000 vehicles a year just based on rough mathematics using a sample area that I am sure is dwarfed by higher trafficked yards in the western part of the country. This also doesn’t include the thousands of other junkyards across the country whether they be big corporate entities like Pull-a-Part and Pick-N-Pull (creative names I know), or mom and pop operations that are littered all throughout rural America. If you ever doubted the sheer scale of vehicle scrapping and recycling in the United States, I highly recommend you (virtually) travel down Dr. Martin Luther King Blvd in Phoenix, Arizona.
This street feels like miles upon miles of just auto glass, tires bumpers, engines you name it. I recently traveled down this road when I was in PHX for work, and plan on going back just to get drone footage of it all.
The sheer scale of these places can only be felt at ground level since many of these scrap yards have their vehicles stacked multiple cars high.
You may also note that I am going out of my way to specify this is data for the customer facing locations, this is becuase LKQ is not just a junkyard for older vehicles. They are a full time dismantling business, which is why you wont see many brand new vehicles at these locations. They are kept in separate facilities where they can be professionally broken down and their parts sold to body shops and repair shops to keep cars on the road. This leads me to another interesting data point I wanted to compare between the CFC vehicles and the scraped data list, average vehicle age.
The data here shows something I already knew, but was still shocked at the pure uniformity of it. The average age of a vehicle being scrapped in the US is almost exactly 20 years old.
As for the CFC Data here are the top 10 makes that were the newest when scrapped:
Roush Performance (2): 2006Saturn (1): 2005Suzuki (1307): 2001Kia (3181): 2001Hyundai (566): 1999Honda (3284): 1998Aston Martin (1): 1997Land Rover (2158): 1996Infiniti (2974): 1996Chrysler (11226): 1995
And here are the oldest average vehicles scrapped in CFC:
Merkur (42): 1987Porsche (11): 1987ASC Incorporated (4): 1987CCC Engineering (1): 1987Excalibur Auto (3): 1987Maserati (6): 1986Lambda Control (3): 1986American Motor (68): 1985TVR Engineering (1): 1985AM General (12): 1984The average age of a CFC car was built in 1994, which when the program was occurring was a roughly 15 year old vehicle. (In 2009). That means those same vehicles today would be swiftly approaching the 30 year mark. Old enough in most states to qualify for a Historic Tag.
Export Markets
While most of my wirting thus far has been regarding junkyards where vehicles are scrapped / dismantled, there is also a massive market for US exported vehicles. Lots of these cars are cheaper commuter cars that end up at IAA auctions when traded in at dealers, or cars sent to Copart lots when insurance totals them out. Parts of South America, Africa, and Eastern Europe have low enough labor rates, while having access to body shop tools that make these repairs more economically viable and give a lot of these cars a second life.
Reports put the amount of used vehicles exported out of the US yearly well over 1,000,000. This is again more cars per year than C4C killed during its entire program.
The Actual Purpose of C4C
As I was wrtting this article, another C4C ragebait thread got posted on reddit. Thankfully the discourse was pretty level-headed with many commenters agreeing with the fact that this program, while killing a handful of enthusiast vehicles, was overall a culling of some truly miserable 80s-90s cars. A lot of enthusiasts also forgot why the program existed in the first place, to get some sort of life-line back into the automotive economy which was getting absolutely massacred for obvious reasons in the 08-09 downturn.
There was a very poignant comment in the thread too which I wanted to highlight which touches strongly on the whole reason it existed in the first place:
It's a rehashed dig for car enthusiasts who like to blame the admin at the time, but people seem to conveniently forget that the auto industry was devastated the second people suddenly couldn't get HELOCs to buy that shiny new Suburban anymore and the 10 houses they owned 0 money down were all going into foreclosure. I worked in consumer finance tech back then and it was not a good place to be.
Several thousand new car dealerships closed from 2008 - 2009
C4C only accounted for ~40 cars per dealer back then and car sales were down an overall 40%. Dealers averaged ~1k sales each which meant C4C would have only gotten ~10% of what they lost in that 2009.
Conclusion
While we can bemoan the loss of a Supra or a Foxbody Mustang, lets not pretend that many of the cars in the C4C program would have been long off the road today. When was the last time you saw a Plymouth Voyager or first gen Taurus actually being used as a daily? Even if the car had escaped destruction, I doubt your favorite local rage baiter who posted a C4C article would actually want to drive one.
In 2025, C4C has very little affect on the used car market. With the prices of steel ever climbing, the demand for scrap will continue to go up, and as long as labor rates stay high, many fixable “junker” cars will continue to find their way outside of the US’s borders to places where they can be fixed on the cheap and back on the road. The rise of automotive flippers and the ease of finding cheap cars through online forums like Marketplace has made finding cheap cars a challenge but not impossible. My yard full of sub $500 Volvos, and my daily for years was an $700 Volvo 960 wagon. So next time you see someone say that C4C killed the used car market, ask yourself if they are being genuine or just there to drive engagement.
