Word: carly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...money well spent? To get an answer, TIME contributor Joseph Szczesny spoke with Jesse Toprak, vice president of industry trends and insights at Truecar.com, a car-sales-data website. Toprak has more than 15 years' experience in the automotive industry, including nearly nine years with Edmunds, one of the largest sites for consumer information on the Internet...
...benefited from the program? From the manufacturers' perspective, everybody except for the luxury carmakers. Hyundai, Kia, Toyota, Honda, Nissan, as well as Ford and GM's small-car lineups all experienced sizable sales increases. The perfect vehicle for the program was the sub-$20K midsize compact car. You will have a tough time finding any inventory that fits that description in most dealer lots today...
Some economists worry that the clunker program borrowed sales from future months, so we'll soon be hit with an ugly payback. I think that the payback-factor predictions for this program have been greatly exaggerated. I would argue that hundreds of thousands of potential new car buyers actually postponed buying a car within the last year due to economic uncertainty, and some of them ended up buying within the last few weeks due to the CFC program. That is, it motivated people to buy who had not been planning to do so, which means there shouldn...
...customers cashing in on the program seemed to have no trouble finding financing. What happened? For one thing, the CFC incentive was used as all or part of the consumers' down payment, automatically increasing loan-approval rates - the bigger the down payment, the higher the approval rates for car loans, everything else being equal. The $4,500 incentive sometimes was doubled by manufacturer incentives. Even if you have less-than-perfect credit, if you put $9,000 down on a $25,000 vehicle, you have a good chance of getting approved. We also saw the captive finance companies becoming more...
...makers of the Trabi aren't the only German car manufacturers turned on by the dream of electric cars. Volkswagen says it will launch an electric car by 2013, while Daimler, the maker of powerful gas-guzzling Mercedes-Benz limousines, has teamed up with power utility RWE for a series of electric-car tests in Berlin...