UK old car scrappage scheme

The UK Government's scrappage scheme finished at the end of March 2010 with over 320,000 new vehicles registered under the scheme. It's been replaced by various manufacturers swappage-, discount- or special offer- schemes

The basics of the scheme were that if you traded in an old car, then you'd get £2000 off the price of a new one. In reality it was more complicated than that....

You had to have owned the car for more than 12 months.
The car had to have an current MOT
It must have been first registered in the UK on or before 29th March 2000 (V-registration or earlier)

Which effectively ruled out first-time buyers - unless of course somebody in your family had a car that qualified and the new car was registered in their name.

The funding for the scheme was split beween the UK Government and the car manufacturers - which was a bit of surprise to the latter as it was different to other European schemes. The net effect was that discounts disappeared from cheap, low-margin models.

Green Benefits

One of the aims of the scheme was to remove 'polluting bangers' from our roads and if you look at just the CO2 output, then you might be convinced. Older vehicles will be in the range 160g/km and above and new, small cars are generally in the range 140g/km and below. If you take into account the number of vehicles being replaced the overall effect will be in the region of a 2% overall reduction in passenger car CO2 output.

You have to take into account the energy used to produce these 'still running' cars in the first place, which is reckoned to be about 15% of the total energy used in the vehicle's whole life. Due to the amount of energy required to build a car, the new car only starts to be a benefit on overall CO2 output after 8 years of use.

Safety

There's no doubt that new cars are safer than those over 10 years old. Not only have new technologies like airbags and ABS become more widely available but vehicle's crash structures have improved dramatically.

This sceme didn't necessarily remove 'unsafe' cars from the road as the trade-in had to have a vaild MOT certificate but a lot can happen in 12 months to cars that are not looked after properly.

Now that Scrappage has ended...

Several manufacturers have announced 'swappage' schemes or other schemes. These may just save you the haggling but it'll still be worth doing it as you could get an even better deal, especially if your trade-in car is half-decent. The rules about age of vehicle and how long you've owned it are likely to be different from the Government scheme.

< back to what’s right 4 u