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Scrappage schemes are back. Good or bad?

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Scrappage schemes are back. Good or bad? | Top Gear

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Ford is grabbing headlines with its latest £2,000 scrappage incentive. Thoughts?

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Scrappage schemes are back. Good or bad?

# data.attributes.metatag[].attributes.content
Ford is grabbing headlines with its latest £2,000 scrappage incentive. Thoughts?

# data.attributes.metatag[].attributes.content
Ford is grabbing headlines with its latest £2,000 scrappage incentive. Thoughts?

# data.attributes.metatag[].attributes.content
Scrappage schemes are back. Good or bad?

# data.attributes.metatag[].attributes.content
Scrappage schemes are back. Good or bad?

# data.attributes.metatag[].attributes.content
Scrappage schemes are back. Good or bad?

# data.attributes.metatag[].attributes.content
Ford is grabbing headlines with its latest £2,000 scrappage incentive. Thoughts?

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Remember the scrappage scheme? It was the motor industry’s big thing in 2009. While the premise was taking old, polluting cars off UK roads and replacing them with cleaner, shinier ones, it acted more as a booster to an industry in the grasp of a recession. ‘The credit crunch’, if you remember your alliterative tabloid vernacular.

Well scrappage is back, eight years later, in a slightly new form. Last time it involved cars aged ten years or older being valued at £2,000 at trade-in, regardless of their actual value, with carmakers and the government going halves on the two grand discount on your new car.

Now, it’s a more manufacturer specific thing, and it’s centred around improving air quality. Mercedes, BMW and – to greater headlines – Ford have all announced schemes so far, ones which offer a £2,000 discount when you trade in a car made before 2010, one that doesn’t comply with ‘Euro 5’ cleanliness rules. So you trade in a dirtier car when regulations were looser, and get a cleaner, brand new one.

But there are complexities to the schemes. Ford pledges to scrap all the cars that come in, while BMW and Mercedes will keep some of them on the road. Ford will let you trade in against particular models, but not all of them. Mercedes will only let you apply the discount to diesel, hybrid or electric models, and BMW’s scheme is only for trade-ins against new cars emitting sub-130g/km of CO2.

Then there’s the argument that, these days, £2,000 isn’t all that much off the value of a new car. Especially when the cockier among us can haggle at least that much off the showroom price before any trade-in is applied.

Mercedes promises to add the sum to the typical trade-in value of the car you’re giving up, while Ford will add it to discounts it’s already applying to its cars and vans. So scrap something when you buy a new Transit Custom and you’ll actually get £7,000 off the price. While the new Fiesta is in the scheme, you’ll just get the basic £2,000 against that.

As regulations against petrol and diesel cars crank up, the car industry needs to provide a solution, as its cars have caused the problem in the first place. But is a couple of grand off a brand new car (that could cost more than ten times as much) a noble enough gesture?

Or is the likelihood of someone with an old duffer being in the market for something brand new slim enough to make this irrelevant? There’s also the small matter of the wondrous cars we lost to the last scrappage scheme, a gallery of which is here…

What are your thoughts? Are you dusting off your old banger and sizing up a new BMW, Ford or Merc as we speak? Or have you got a smarter idea for cleaning up the air quality of our towns and cities?

# data.attributes.body.processed
Remember the scrappage scheme? It was the motor industry’s big thing in 2009. While the premise was taking old, polluting cars off UK roads and replacing them with cleaner, shinier ones, it acted more as a booster to an industry in the grasp of a recession. ‘The credit crunch’, if you remember your alliterative tabloid vernacular.

Well scrappage is back, eight years later, in a slightly new form. Last time it involved cars aged ten years or older being valued at £2,000 at trade-in, regardless of their actual value, with carmakers and the government going halves on the two grand discount on your new car.

Now, it’s a more manufacturer specific thing, and it’s centred around improving air quality. Mercedes, BMW and – to greater headlines – Ford have all announced schemes so far, ones which offer a £2,000 discount when you trade in a car made before 2010, one that doesn’t comply with ‘Euro 5’ cleanliness rules. So you trade in a dirtier car when regulations were looser, and get a cleaner, brand new one.

But there are complexities to the schemes. Ford pledges to scrap all the cars that come in, while BMW and Mercedes will keep some of them on the road. Ford will let you trade in against particular models, but not all of them. Mercedes will only let you apply the discount to diesel, hybrid or electric models, and BMW’s scheme is only for trade-ins against new cars emitting sub-130g/km of CO2.

Then there’s the argument that, these days, £2,000 isn’t all that much off the value of a new car. Especially when the cockier among us can haggle at least that much off the showroom price before any trade-in is applied.

Mercedes promises to add the sum to the typical trade-in value of the car you’re giving up, while Ford will add it to discounts it’s already applying to its cars and vans. So scrap something when you buy a new Transit Custom and you’ll actually get £7,000 off the price. While the new Fiesta is in the scheme, you’ll just get the basic £2,000 against that.

As regulations against petrol and diesel cars crank up, the car industry needs to provide a solution, as its cars have caused the problem in the first place. But is a couple of grand off a brand new car (that could cost more than ten times as much) a noble enough gesture?

Or is the likelihood of someone with an old duffer being in the market for something brand new slim enough to make this irrelevant? There’s also the small matter of the wondrous cars we lost to the last scrappage scheme, a gallery of which is here…

What are your thoughts? Are you dusting off your old banger and sizing up a new BMW, Ford or Merc as we speak? Or have you got a smarter idea for cleaning up the air quality of our towns and cities?

# data.attributes.field_standfirst
Ford is grabbing headlines with its latest £2,000 scrappage incentive. Thoughts?