I knew the "Cash-for-Clunkers" program was starting this past weekend, so I took the MullMobile, which is the poster child for clunkers, to be put gently to sleep. Regular Mullsters might remember that I wrote a - to use a word applied to me the other day by the Washington Post's Mary Ann Akers - "snarky" MULLINGS about the Clunker program, which is formerly known as the Car Allowance Rebate System last month (Obama Motors has a Deal for You).
But, as hypocrisy has never been a particular problem for me, I went to see if I could spend a little of Mr. Obama's money.
The MullMobile is a 1999 Land Rover Discovery. Land Rover had been a British firm. When I bought mine it had been purchased by BMW. Then Ford bought Land Rover. Finally they sold it to the Indian car company, Tata.
My Discovery has been through some tough times, none of which were the result of my having taken it on safari. In fact, when I picked it up the salesman was trying to show me how to put it in low gear, and how to take it up and down river banks, and how to scoop lions up in the front brush guard.
I said to the guy - this is true - "When you're talking to a 50-something man from Brooklyn, 'off-road' means … the driveway."
Even at that, over a decade, scratches turn in to dings; dings turn into dents; dents turn into rust spots, and rust spots turn into holes.
On Thursday last week, I cut a corner a little too closely, clipped a street sign with my right outside mirror and the glass broke away from the housing. The cellophane tape I used to keep the mirror in place worked pretty well, but I knew that, with the broken mirror, the camel's back had been broken.
On Saturday morning, I went to bluebook.com to get a sense of what the MullMobile might be worth in a trade. $2,175 - but there was no box to enter the fact that the right outside mirror was being held together with Scotch Tape and all the engine warning lights are on all the time, so I suspected a real trade-in situation might well have resulted in my paying the dealer to take it off my hands.
The way the Cash-for-Clunkers program works is, you are selling your old car for between $3,500 and $4,500. Period. Any dealer and/or manufacturing incentives are on top of the C-f-C money.
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