http://money.cnn.com/2009/01/19/autos/chrysler_fiat.reut/index.htm?postversion=2- 009012005


condescendingly said: the merging of two junk-producers. i havent a good opinion of both, chrysler is even worse tahn fiat.

fiat had well designed cars in the 60ies, thats all positive, i think about them. and the people at the fiat-dealer with gas-station in our village are very nice.

imho the only good thing chrysler ever had made, was the dodge charger of the late 60ies.

I'm sure this move has been well advised by FIATs marketers and accountants, but I fear a deluge of unfortunate badge-engineering exercises on the American side.

It would be funny to see rebadged Fiat sold as Chrysler in USA

Where did you get that information? Did you ever drive a Chrysler or even own one?


btw: this is the all new Fiasler 500C:

no, but i am a very resentful guy, who grew up as a car-crazy child in the 70ies and 80ies. from that times i still associate chrysler with the french chrysler-simca-junk. i remember my class-mates in the late 80ies -in the 80ies, until the wall to the gdr felt down, it was cool for younger people to drive an older, stylish car, not a modern corsa, polo or fiesta-, whose had a chrysler simca horizon and the other a chrysler simca 1308. very 70ies-style, but unbelievable worse quality.

yes, the us-company chrysler was something different, but they had their own quality-problems. in the time, when the legendary lee iacocca was the chrysler-boss (and after amc broke down), chrysler was known as the us-car-company with the less reliable cars.

the styling of the majority of the us-cars of the 80ies and 90ies was worse imho, worse than the most european cars, and chrysler was not better. the k-car-series belonged to the biggest horror.

as i wrote, i am very resentful. i dislike chrysler for many reasons, but there is just one little thing, which causes my real disgust about the chrysler-company: http://imcdb.org/vehicle_90785-Dodge-600-1986.html
this overwhelmingly impudence



i don't like ford either, mainly for two reasons, even if they had happend years ago: the wrecking-option of ford germany in the mid-90ies, where they paid money, if you gave them an older car for crushing, when you bought a new ford - because they really crushes all incoming cars, all. no chance to pick up any of these cars. really nice oldies were wrecked there.
so this is the main reason for me, that a ford will never come into my house. if my wife should by a ford for her own, i will throw the car our of the garage. no ford in my garage.

the other reason to hate ford was the tv-spot of the ford puma. what an impudence to combinate it with scence with steve mcqueens mustang fastback of the bullitt-movie.
ths mustang fastback is the only us-ford, which i like. the granada mk2 2.8 ghia would be the only european one, which would be acceptable for me.

Same happened in France, but organized by the government
It was illegal and impossible to put on the road again a car which was marked as "for destruction".

just since last week the german government had started such project again.

if you buy a brand new car -or a "jahreswagen", a car not older than one year, you will get 2500 euro from the government, if you gave a car for wrecking, which is minimum 9 years old and was for minimum 1 year registrated on your personal name.

there is still a public discussion, if these old cars shal be crushed or if they should be recycled in pieces. but they should not be coming on the road again and shall not be exported (as actually 80 percent of the used cars in germany).

this "abwrackprämie"-idea was founded to do something against the economy-crisis, mainly the crisis of the car-companies. not only in the usa, also over here, the car-dealers are overloaded with new and used cars, which they cannot sell any more.
indeed, if you go along the dealers over here, they let their cars standing on the grass besides they shops, some dealer even had rented parking-lots in the neighbourhood to store their cars.

two weeks ago i was wondering, why a parking of a big household-electro-market was smaller than before. the mecedes-dealer next door took one third of the parking-space to put his brand new cars there.


anyways, even these 2500 euro from the government will not initiate, that i will give aways my omega for scrapping. the k 70 naturally neither.

Ths "thing" is done to help people buy new cars, i don't see what's the problem of it, of course you won't give your Omega if you don't need a new car Ingo , but many people that needs a new cars buys the car because 1.000€ help a lot... and the cars given are rarely pieces to preserve but normal cars from the nineties that breakdown all the time and are a nightmare for their owners, nobody uses a "classic" car as a daily driver because he can't afford a newer car, so nobody is going to go with a car (like a K70) and give it away to buy a new one, because to start of with someone else would give you more money for it than any dealership.

In France that thing started in the 90s "killed" lots of cars of the 70s, even sometimes cars of the 60s.
Many old people had an old car, sometimes in very good state.

I only own(ed) two Chryslers (Neons) and never have had any breakdowns, no major issues. Just reliable. I mean if a car company made poor cars back in the 80s they are still supposed to be poor?! Almost every car maker made terrible models. My brother, for instance, had two Alfa Romeo 155. I really appreciated the styling then, but both were made from terrible quality. But this was back in the 90s. Maybe these days they make better cars. Opel was suffering from quality problems for many years ("Rust ain´t no crime"). Even the former Mercedes E-class was suffering from a huge corrosion problem. What goes around comes around.
I cannot say anything about the current quality of Chrysler products. But I never felt sorry for purchasing the Neons.

@ccf: in your point of view there is a big misunderstanding.
yes, it is thought as a help for the car-industry. but think logical: people, who have an old, worthless car -less value than the 2500 euro, the govrnment will pay- is usually not the typical customer-ship to buy a brand new car. no money or no interest, or both. when you dont have money for a new car, the 2500 euro dont help you, because you need more. and if these people would be really buying a new car, they will not choose a mercedes, bmw or an audi, rahter something small, economic - but cheap, small cars arent made in germany, they are mainly from korea or romania. so this will not help the german car-industry.

indeed, i just read an article about the first results of this 2500 euro-auction. the big winner is - dacia. with these 2500 euro they can make the big advertises: "a brand new car for just 5000 euro". the selling of kia and the korean chevrolets goes up, too in germany. opel-dealers are selling a lot of corsa and the smallest astra-versions - but signum, insigna and vectra are still standing around. but these bigger cars are the cars, the companies are making money.

Well in the nineties they still didn't have he value they have now so it wasn't something that odd.. plus i doubt that so many of them were really destroyed




No, trust me there's no missunderstanding at all from my part, we have this here too and i know how it works... i don't really understand what you mean on the following paragraph but anyway this "help" is just that, a "help" not the full quantity of money to buy the car, so people that doesn't have much money appreciate this help, it's too easy to say i won't ever accept that when you have a relatively new car that does not give you big problems... and then what do you mean about Audi, BMW etc? isn't the help for every brand or what? the thing is that this has existed several times in Spain, the last time the first Plan Prever "ended" was in arround 2003 when we bought our 406 and trust me the cars in the back part of the dealership weren't worth anything, so nothing valuable was there, as i said, if nowadays there's really people with old classic cars they won't give them to the dealership since they can get more money by selling them to any other particular person, so i don't see any danger in that part...



Logical... this is likely to happen with the cheaper brands not the expensive luxury ones, and car companies make money with any sale as long as they sale cars, sometimes the top of the range trim of a small compact car is more expensive than the cheapest version of a bigger car... so that doesn't really mean anything.

I assure you that it really helped to renew the cars, and that it sent many to the junkyard.
In French forums there were loads of examples.
And they were destroyed: you could not register it again for the road.
(else just left in a junkyard: I saw many pics of cars in not so bad state in junkyards because of that...)

I trust you but even if sad i find these helps as quite a good idea, people having trouble to buy a new car have it easier with these helps, we just have to imagine ourselves in that potition, and that was probabaly in the nineties but i'm so sure that nowadays the cars to go to the junkyard are just old ninenties cars (which does not mean that i don't like them of course) that give problems to their owners, and besides it's only car lovers to really feel bad about this, a person with an old car and no interest in cars at all has no trouble on giving away their old cars, even recieving an amount of money for them, which is even better.

My uncle to start of with had an accident with his 1994 Clio this summer, the car went backwards down the slope entrance of his house and the car got destroyed, repairable if it had been new but not worth it for such an old car, imagine how happy he was when he found out that at the Renault dealership they'd gave him 1.000€ for such car! a 1994 destroyed Renault Clio that worth nothing! that was a help for him and motivated him to buy a new car, that's just how it works, sad or not...

Alas, that's true. I made my own experiences a few years ago when I tried to rescue a beautiful, green (limonengrünmetallic) Opel Kadett B which was doomed to die such a death. I never had a fondness for small cars at all, but this little thing was in almost immaculate shape, so I felt I had to try it. A valuable classic that didn't deserve to be crushed. But no chance, the scrap dealer wouldn't set it free, neither officially nor on the quiet, because he was not allowed to. I could have parted the car out, but due to a lack of storage space, I didn't.

How can you even say this? Systematically destorying perfectly good cars for no reason is a crime that should be punishable by death! To me these "laws" sound like a second Holocaust... but this time for cars. I can understand if the car is really a piece of crap and has a horrible body, engine, or transmission, but if it still looks decent and runs fine why the hell should it be destroyed for no reason?? And the majority of people buying new cars nowadays don't even "need" a new car (I think I read somewhere it's around 70% or so of all new car buyers). They just want a new car, the one they have is perfectly fine, but they just want to be "modern" or look "cool" or something. And I'm sorry but that kind of thing is just the height of douchebaggery. Those kind of people are just superficial spolied brats.

This brings up one of the very few reasons I am happy that I live in the Michigan, where there are no inspections, regulations, or stupid incentives like this to get rid of old cars. You have the freedom to drive what you want, without people trying to make you take your old beauty to the crusher.

P.S. You refer to cars of the 90s as old, but with the quality that cars are built with these days they are really not so "old" after all...

Sure, there are loads of cars for which it was not a problem.
But not all cars are in this case.
Now you can still find 80s cars (or even 70s cars) in good state which would end due to that.
When I was following topics on forum-auto about cars found abandoned or in junkyards there were lots of stories and even pictures about that.
Hard to find them back, but few that I found by searching:
http://i36.tinypic.com/oi9nc3.jpg
http://images.forum-auto.com/mesimages/310200/000_0459.jpg
http://images.forum-auto.com/mesimages/339323/HPIM0553.JPG (DS, 204, R16, ... not typical 90s old cars )
http://images.forum-auto.com/mesimages/339323/HPIM0534.JPG

If there's someone to blame then there's the people that give the "old" cars not the "system" created...



And the point of keeping those cars would be?? we care about any car because we're car fans but let's be realistic, what could a dealership do with older than 15 years cars?? after all, even if they run well they are old cars and they're likely to fail much sooner so the prices they could be sold at would be ridicoulous.



Sure, if you could afford it you wouldn't buy a new Crown Victoria or any other car you love right? oh come on nobody believes that... no offence but that's quite stupid to say, we all would love to change car frecuently, or are you saying that you'll keep your GM and won't buy a new car in 50 years if the car still runs after all that time? and don't tell me you can keep it and keep buying newer cars because that's still called "buy a new car to look cool or modern" which i don't see the problem of, we keep criticizing people for whether they do or not, aren't we free to do what we want? then i don't see the problem of taking this as something personal, we all like to look modern with a new car and we all like to show off our cars, specially us, the one to be fan of cars.

Buying a new car is not anyway something you think about today and you do tomorrow, specially nowadays (and specifically in Spain) where people are not in their best moments now for this crisis we're having, so unless you have a lot of money people that buy a car do it because they really need it, the car my family has now (i mean since we're a familly) is the second one in only twenty years! our former car, an Orion from 1986 was kept until 2003 (or so) when we bought the Peugeot, 17 years on the road and my dad was fed up already for all the amount of money he was spending on it lately, the car had breakdowns frecuently and left my dad on the road several times, and like we did many families do too, which are even the people to give away older than 15 years cars, someone who bought a car from that time onwards cannot benefit of this "system" since their cars are too new therefore they won't be crushed.

Sure that some of the times nice cars will be crushed but we can't do anything agaisnt that, it's a shame? yes it is but there's nothing we can do, and as i said if in a future day i have a car 18 years old (just to put an example) and i need a new one because this one starts failing i will surely take advantage of the system (specially if the car is something that nobody will be interested in to give me the same amount of money), it's not that easy to say "i wouldn't do it" when you need that money and you really need a new car becuase you need a mean of transport for everyday use.

Even if we like them we must get real and know that cars from the eighties and nineties don't worth anything for people not interested in cars.




Inspections are rather to keep you safe in case the car has something wrong than to make people crush their cars.

Yes it's a shame they're all there, the Delta, the older Peugeots etc, but how do we know if they really were in perfect conditions?? and what is more, how do we know if they were crushed because of this system ?

Just joking, as i said it's a shame if they really were sent there because of that but we have to put ourselves in the potition fo those people, i just wouldn't send any of those cars there but for their owners they worth nothing, they were just old cars, and those are exceptions, imagine the same situation with a Renault 19 or with a Ford Escort, nobody would be interested, so if someone gives you the chance of charging you 1.000€ for them then you accept it, if i remember correctly i think that my uncle even got a discount for giving an old car too, but i'm not sure i'd have to ask him.

Well for the Delta, 504 and Golf it was confirmed that these are from that system. And that system require that the cars are running.
But of course they could also be unreliable etc.
I just said that sometimes this destroys perfectly good cars, though that this must represent only a small percentage of the destroyed cars.



Indeed, if a car does not pass these inspections, it must be repaired or taken out of the road, that's normal to not keep on the road cars which could be dangerous.