Post Scrappage Rant

It's going to be hilarious when people try to trade these cars in after a year or two. I spoke to one dealer recently who said he doesn't see Megane's as 21k cars anymore, he sees them as 15k cars, and reckons he'd give 10k for one a year old.

PaintDoctor wrote: »

It's going to be hilarious when people try to trade these cars in after a year or two. I spoke to one dealer recently who said he doesn't see Megane's as 21k cars anymore, he sees them as 15k cars, and reckons he'd give 10k for one a year old.

This is yet another drawback of the scrappage scheme, and like you say, the consequences won't make themselves apparent for quite some time to come.

Renault are heading for a crash landing similar to what happened with Citroen about 10 years ago when they started giving cars away, and that was at a time when there was absolutely no need to be discounting so heavily!

I could understand the fuss about Renaults if they were actually something interesting like the Renaultsport models, (when Renault want to they can by all accounts make cars that are fantastic to drive) which sell in droves in the UK but all that was bought here was cheap disposable rubbish.

Drummerboy08 wrote: »

I have to disagree with you there - it's of huge benefit to the thousands of PAYE workers who are employed in the motor trade. If these people were to be made redundant the Taxpayer would end up footing a bill of hundreds of millions to support these people.

There have been hundreds of thousands of people let go from other sectors why should one get preferential treatment? We should have been supporting what's left of out native industries not services for imported items.

Also, the scrappage scheme has encouraged alot of people to buy low emission cars. Explain to me how that's not good for the enviroment?

A good quality 10 year old car would have at least another 5 years life when maintained correctly.
This car has been made so can be taken as starting out at neutral emissions, this car then needs to be scrapped which produces pollution, then the car that was ordered needs to be manufactured (there's no overstock of cars any more after all the plant closures over the last few years), this new car then needs to be transported half way around the world to Ireland(or at least several thousand KM from Europe).

Say that the average scrapped car was a 30mpg car and replaced with a 60mpg car. We've reduced Irish emissions by 50% but created a huge amount of pollution elsewhere to do this. How many miles will the new car have to be driven before the energy used in it's production is recovered and will any of these cars actually make that mileage?

How is this good for the environment?

People here are trying to encourage buying Irish products, but you've just claimed that one of the biggest Irish made items out there are poorly made?

Not only that, but if people had have paid more attention to what they were spending their money on in the first place, they wouldn't have to worry about this problem.

It also wouldn't have kept half as many people in employment, which goes back to my first point above.

The houses where built to spec but the spec wasn't the best or anywhere near good enough, which is partly how we got to be in the state we're in.

That's someone's personal choice - if they want to buy a new car instead of building an extension then it's up to them to do so.

Alot of people put money into home improvements instead of buying a car, so this is kind of a moot point.

People can buy what they want. But then every industry should have gotten similar deals as the motor trade. It would have been just as easy to do VAT refunds for building renovations and it would have kept honest tax paying builders working.

Again, the Irish motor trade provides direct employment in Ireland. Thousands of people in fact. Just because car's aren't built in Ireland anymore does not mean that the motor trade is useless.

I can also assure you that the majority of people who bought a new car in the last two years more than likely did so with their own cash. The banks in Ireland simply do not have the money to lend.


Again, I don't see your point. We DO have a Motor Industry in Ireland. While it is not involved in the manufacturing end of things, it is involved in the sales, and maintenance end of things.

The motor industry currently provides thousands of jobs but not for long. Now the scappage is gone there are big changes on the way and the only benefit we'll have is loads of 11 reg cars that'll all be wrecked in a few years as they aren't at all suitable for the use their being used for.

dr.fuzzenstein wrote: »

Yes, in Germany, France, Italy, Japan and mostly Korea.
Some of these cars where on sale for E8k, what will they be worth in 10 years time?
The greens have created the throwaway car culture, buy it, drive it for 5 years, another guy will have it for tuppence, as soon as anything major goes wrong, such as DMF cutch, injectors, ECU (and they WILL go wrong, these are McCars, made crappily and cheaply) they are not worth repairing, so scrap them for another McCar.
Of course making and recycling all these cars will produce HUGE levels of CO2, but that will be just another reason to slap more tax onto petrol.
It is an environmental disaster waiting to happen, it does nothing but to take a lot of good old cars out of the market and replacing them with cars that have a life expectency of 10 years.
I hate the greens for this, I hate their smugness, their arrogance, their stupidity, but most of all I hate their hypocricy, the sellout of the environment, for what I don't know, because people have seen them for the weasly, lying bastards they are and kicked them out, hopefully never to be seen again.

Nice rant:)!

I do think it is ironic that in the quest to force car manfacturers to fit expensive technology that will cause more hassle and cost than the fuel savings available, that cars will now have a shorter working life, meaning more pollution overall due to the fact that more cars will have to be made and more cars will be scapped.

It is a shame to think that so many cars from the 90s, when reliability was never better, are now gone to the crusher because of some ill thought out scheme:(!

Because people think they're getting a great deal. They're buying a car which is worth 21k for 15k, so they think they'll get a few years of depreciation free motoring. This isn't peculiar to Renault in case anyone thinks I'm having a go at Renault - it's the same with all scrappage deals. Personally, I think fair play to Renault for getting so many cars on the road!

PaintDoctor wrote: »

It's going to be hilarious when people try to trade these cars in after a year or two. I spoke to one dealer recently who said he doesn't see Megane's as 21k cars anymore, he sees them as 15k cars, and reckons he'd give 10k for one a year old.

I doubt many of them will be getting traded in after a year or two anyway. Anyone that got a car on scrappage is comign from owning a car over 10 years old. We are not talking about the people who upgrade to the same model every 2 years.

dr.fuzzenstein wrote: »

Some of these cars where on sale for E8k, what will they be worth in 10 years time?.

Anout the same as if the same car was €15k new.

-Chris- wrote: »

I'd expect that those who have bought deep-discount Renaults (for example) will find that they're now "stuck" in the Renault network because of the trade-in value that will be offered by other dealers. I'd also expect that brands like Renault who have bought the market, will soon find that they've damaged their brand value very deeply.

Yes it will indeed be very interesting to see what happens to people who bought the Renaults that were virtually given away (even though with all this giving away of cars they still were outsold by Ford, VW and Toyota).

I suppose Renault's thinking is that if the new cars are much better put together then people will come back and buy more of them, especially as Renault offers a five year warranty. That could prove to be a very attractive proposition.

I think even if Renaults are properly made now that this will not be enough to save them - many people still believe that VWs are "great cars" even though VW hasn't made especially reliable cars for a good 10-15 years and have made some extremely unreliable ones, such as the 1.4 petrol Golf, which lots of people bought. I mean if a Fiat suffered HG failure the typical attitude is "serves you right for buying a Fiat - you should have known better" but if you bought a Toyota burning lots of oil or one that needs new gearbox bearings it's a case of "really bad luck" (even though both faults are common with several Toyotas).

Stereotypes about cars are extremely hard to shake off in Ireland, the average buyer has SFA interest in cars and relies heavily on what the man in the pub told them.