From May 18th this year, until March 2010 or until the budget of £300 million that’s been put in place for it runs out, a new government funded car scrappage scheme has been brought into play. It’s a voluntary scheme for manufacturers, but if they join the scheme, then when you buy a new vehicle they’ll give you £2,000 off the price if you let them scrap your old vehicle, and then they will be reimbursed half this amount (i.e. £1000) by the government.

It won’t be available for ALL cars, you’ll have to meet certain specifications, or rather, your car will. First of all the car must have been registered in the UK before 31st Aug 1999, and either be registered on the road, or have a valid SORN certificate. It also has to be in the name of the person buying the new car, and has to have been registered to that person for 12mths before the order date of the new car. This is to stop people buying up an old wreck and then using it to get the £2,000 off the new vehicle. There are a few other rules as well, but these are the basics.

The scheme has been introduced as a way of boosting the UK’s car industry which has been hit rather hard by the global recession that we’re going through at the moment. Similar schemes have been launched in other places in Europe with success such as Germany, France and Italy. There are so far thirty eight manufacturers hoping to gain additional customers by joining this scheme.

The other benefits of the scheme are that older cars tend to have higher CO2 emissions and so by scrapping these older cars we remove some of the worst pollutants from the roads. In addition to this, over the last ten years there have been huge improvements to safety features in cars which means that by reducing the number of older cars on the roads, overall safety should be improved as well.

The beginning of this scheme has however seen a few teething problems as some companies come to grips with how the system works. Hopefully though these will soon be ironed out and many more people will be able to take advantage of the scheme and improve their drive without having to spend as much as they might have without the scheme.