That's so frustrating. I'm in NYC and had a crappy experience shopping for cars as the pandemic was taking off. The dealers seems dis-interested, but they would certainly sell a car for their asking price. I ultimately ended up going with a cheap old used car that I bought directly from the previous owner. If I get to a point where I want a new car, I think I'll just order it.

More precisely, it removed the portion of the bottom of the market belonging to people who were on the fence about upgrading and making their cars available, so in that way it's similar to EV tax credits going to wealthy people to subsidize their consumption, but with the added hardship on the people down market.

I sympathize with the would-have-been sellers. I spent probably 8 hours recently to sell a 16 year old car for $4,200, and it would have been easier to do it the cash for clunkers way. But people buying that car are unable to get something newer or want to get their feet under them financially.

> All the cheap beater cars that people just getting on their financial feet would have bought evaporated overnight.

I don't think this is true. If you look at the cars that were destroyed as part of the CARS program, they don't have a large overlap with popular used cars in the US. The top CARS trade-ins were mostly 4WD SUVs and minivans; the most popular used cars a decade ago were (and are) mostly 2WD sedans.

Another way of thinking about it: the entire point of the CARS program was to incentivize car owners to prematurely (from their perspective) buy a new car by offering them credit for their old one. Combined with the disconnect between the cars traded in and the actual used car market in the US, I think it's safe to say that most of the cards exchanged in the program would not have entered the used market and therefore did not meaningfully impact it by going to the scrapyard instead.