Our new car is eligible and our old car is not.
- The 2008 Subaru Tribeca my wife bought last year is eligible to be junked by the Feds. It only rated at 18 Mpg when new. We don’t drive much – it has only about 8,000 miles on it.
- The 1999 Subaru Outback that I inherited when she bought that car is not eligible. It got 22 Mpg when new, and the Feds are absolutely, positive it’s still getting that much, and not one Mpg less.
It get’s better.
- The 1989 Ford Probe that I sold to a neighbor just over a year ago wouldn’t have been eligible if I’d kept it. It officially got 22 Mpg when it was new, but I assure you have I never even got close to this on the highway. This care also failed its one and only mandatory emissions test – way back when in 1991 when I lived in Salt Lake.
This is just mind boggling … this policy embodies Sowell’s argument from A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles
Consider this: my intention to buy a fuel efficient car back in 1989 makes that a decision not to be corrected by this policy, in spite of the facts on the ground that the car probably pollutes more.
Alternatively, the consequences of having a vehicle that was getting too small (the Outback) and the associated choice to get something larger (the Tribeca) was a decision whose motivation wasn’t pure enough to avoid an attempt at remediation from the dim bulbs in D.C.
You can get all the details here (although you can't link directly to pages for specific models).
