Cash for Clunkers Boondoggle

Boondoggle is all I can call the $3 Billion spent on removing around 700,000 so called clunkers from the roads. With three stated purposes of reducing pollution, saving fuel, and stimulating the economy; this program fails in every respect. Actually I shouldn't say fails, it does accomplish all of those things, but at such a high cost it is mind blowing. More than a few articles can be found that back this up, and this isn't coming from crazy news outlets people have never heard of either.

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/cash-for-clunkers-too-much-cash-for-cutting-emissions/

http://www.forbes.com/2009/08/11/cash-for-clunkers-autos-economy-opinions-columnists-shikha-dalmia.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/08/business/08clunker.html?hpw

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gBK8ygR_GgJVJ_9QEjvOcx4J8MxQD99SA4101

Now take that same $3 Billion and spend it on something that actually does have a true cost benefit to the environment, auxiliary power units for trucks, and all the sudden we are talking about some real savings. That amount of money could purchase 352,941 APUs at $8,500 a piece, which is the high end of APU pricing. Just purchasing those would have the possibility of cutting idling by at least 10 hours a day, 300 days a year (we do get home sometimes), for 3,000 hours of idling saved per truck. That is 1,058,823,000 hours of idling saved in a year for the same amount of money that is getting the common man a new car that may save him 3-5 miles per gallon.

Lets be generous and call it 15,000 miles driven in a year (I would call that high) divided by 5 miles per gallon saved times 700,000 new cars. That gives us 2.1 Billion gallons of fuel saved in a year. Which only is saved if everyone actually drives 15,000 miles a year, most people don't even come close to that.

An idling truck consumes an average of a gallon of fuel an hour. An APU typically uses around 2 tenths of a gallon an hour (again a bit high). Now if calculate the fuel used on those trucks idling all that time; 1,058,823,000 gallons of fuel are burned while idling in a year. Now those same 352,941 trucks using an APU would only burn 211,764,600 gallons, a savings of 847,058,400 gallons of fuel.

Now you are looking at that and saying what are you talking about, cash for clunkers is saving more in fuel than buying APUs for trucks. So rather than buying them outright, lets make it more like CARS and have a rebate of $4500 which would allow the purchase of 666,665 APUs. That generates a fuel savings of 1,599,996,000 or about 1.6 billion gallons of fuel in a year. Again a difference in fuel savings, but remember we used an average of 10 hours of idling a day for the trucks. This doesn't include the time idling at a shipper or receiver, or just waiting for a load (in this economy that could be over 24 hours).

Again there are no guarantees that the cars swapped will actually be driven as much as I calculated, but it is a real guarantee that the trucks will be idling to maintain driver comfort while in the sleeper.