Front Seat: Retire Your Ride Program Finally Gaining Some Steam
By Dean Washington
There are few industries that can top the auto industry for coming up with crazy marketing schemes to get you to buy their products or service. Furniture is maybe at par with its fair share of nutty characters and schemes like Crazy Jack Roberts who “takes a chainsaw to high prices” or any of the chain stores where, during their “biggest sale of this week,” no payment is required either until you buy your next couch twenty years from now or the springs start pinching your backside.
Equally, the auto industry marketing minds come up with some innovative ideas as well. Over the years, we have witnessed legendary TV commercials where dealership owners take sledgehammers to perfectly good autos to get our attention. Many are also willing to “eat a bug” if you get a better deal anywhere else, or, of course, offer the free TV, ATV and trip to Las Vegas just for buying a vehicle over this brief 96-month period at a favourable interest rate…what a deal!
But the go-to promotion used by virtually every dealer in the free world over the years has to be the push, pull or drag come-on to attract buyers into their showrooms. The concept is very simple – bring in your old clunker to receive money towards the price of a new vehicle. Makes perfect sense, you get a few bucks for that old gas guzzling chimney on wheels and the dealer makes a sale.
That’s why it seems weird that government and industry have taken so long to really ramp up this program. The Retire Your Ride Program (www.retireyourride.ca) is an initiative of the Government of Canada, Clean Air Foundation and its partners to retire models that are from 1995 or older with the goal of getting off the road 50,000 vehicles per year until March 2011. According to the Clean Air Foundation, on average, a 1995-model year or older car emits 19 times more smog-forming emissions than a 2004 or newer car. The government’s Retire Your Ride program offers $300, transit passes, discounts on bicycles and more to the owners of 1995 model year vehicles or older who turn in their clunkers to be permanently retired.
The program has been around for several years and has so far only managed to retire 14,247 to date, so the target seems mighty lofty if not unreachable. Regional programs like Scrap-It in B.C. have been in existence since 1996, and yet the first time I heard about it was at this year’s new car show in March where they had a booth set up. This program offers up to $1,250 in incentives for people making choices with the highest greenhouse benefit.
Many manufacturers such as Honda and Hyundai have also offered further incentives to these programs in the form of additional monies toward a new vehicle. In fact, our own Russell Purcell this year received $750.00 when he retired his old 1990 Honda Prelude for a new Ridgeline. And recently, Ford has upped the ante by introducing the Ford Recycle Your Ride program, in which you can receive $1,000 toward the purchase of a new car or compact truck, $2,000 toward the purchase of a new crossover or sport utility vehicle and $3,000 toward the purchase of a new truck or Lincoln vehicle.
Having manufacturers like these step up to support these programs may just be another way of selling more vehicles, but in the end we will all benefit from getting these old polluting and, in many cases, dangerous vehicles off the road. This is a push, pull and drag sale we should all support.
Until next month…Keep it Rollin’.
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