Cash for clunkers... the bottom line.

[roman2440]

Originally Posted by Tribesman

That is a very strange way of doing sums.
So how on earth does Edmund.com take their figues of a rebate of $1667 on a $26915 sale and magicly turn it into a $24000 rebate?

Is that a stella example of a crap story?
I don't know which is the funnier claim from their "study", that not many extra cars were sold because of the program or that more cars would have been sold without the program.

Its very simple and relatively accurate. Its simply X amount of money was spent on the program as a whole divided by Y amount of cars that would not have otherwise been sold as part of the program.

Because of the qualifier in the last statement it eliminates a good portion of the cars that were sold as part of the program. What it is really saying, and the most important thing to take away from this experiment, is that even though they sold 690k cars under the program, it really only resulted in a net gain of 125k cars sold. The other 565k cars would have still been sold either during the timeframe of the promotion or at some point later in the year. The net affect is two-fold - 1) A portion of the cars sold under the program would still have been sold had there been no "CARS" program. + 2) With the program, a number of sales for later in the year (after the end of the program) were pulled into the program, resulting in lower sales levels after the program was over.

The report's end result is an attempt to measure the successfullness of the project as a whole. Basically the goal was to provide an influx of sales that otherwise would not have taken place, and the mathmatical result is that it took 24000k per extra car sold to get an addition 125k extra cars sold.