My car is old but runs fine and gets too many miles per gallon to qualify under the “cash for clunkers” program, plus I don’t feel like spending a lot of money on a new vehicle right now. But if I was...is there any rule about how long you have to have owned the “clunker”? Can you go buy a gas-guzzler for $1000 and then the next day use it for your $4500 subsidy?
The person who buys the new car must have owned, registered, and insured the clunker car traded in for at least a year. This is to ensure that the program will deprive the used-car market of the best sub-$3,500/$4,500 vehicles. While a few of the people who can afford new cars will have a spare clunker lying around to cash in on, most such people, if they'd ever had a clunker, would have already sold it.