Car Scrappage Scheme - a lost opportunity to stimulate demand for efficient cars!

Our old Fiat Punto is not looking so good. Since it is 10 years old we have wondered about buying a new car using the govenment's scrappage scheme.

The Punto makes about 41mpg with emissions of 161 g/km, at least this is what the Parker's Guide says - not bad for a 10 year old car. I would have thought that the purpose of the scrappage scheme would be to stimulate demand for more modern and efficient cars. It is proving quite difficult to find one! The Skoda Fabia GreenLine Estate is particularly nice though making 68.9 mpg and sitting in Car Tax Band B. With the scrappage discount it works out at about £10,500. Even the large Octavia GreenLine version makes about 64mpg. Not quite a Prius but not too far off (the new Prius does about 72mpg and I believe over 70mpg around town - out of interest it's about £17k after scrappage discount). Another neat car to look at seems to be the smaller Nissan Note - another efficient Diesel and this one comes with 0% finance on the n-tec version.

What I find staggering though, is that the scrappage scheme applies to ANY new car. You can go and buy a Jaguar XKR which does about 20mpg and has emissions of just under 300 g/km, and get £2,000 for scrapping your old car even though it is MUCH less efficient than the new one.

Clearly, the scrappage scheme is ONLY about stimulating the economy. It has nothing to do with encouraging us to buy more efficient cars. I wonder what would have happened if the scrappage scheme ONLY applied to cars which are tax bands a-c.