One of the upshots of the ‘Cash for Clunkers’ programs put into place by many countries (U.S.A, Germany, U.K., to name a few) to stimulate the economy and ‘save or create’ jobs is that thousands of perfectly decent cars (the ‘clunkers’ traded in) must be destroyed. This is one of the many videos of these clunkers being put to death that is floating around on ‘teh internets’, it looks like a late model Volvo S60 on death row. As part of the deal the car dealers accepting these cars as trade-ins must destroy them. They do this by putting either sulphuric acid or some sort of liquid glass compound into the cars’ engines which are first drained off of oil and then run them till they tear themselves apart.

But can anyone spot what is wrong with this video?

THIS CAR ISN’T A GODDAMN CLUNKER!

It looks like a perfectly good, well maintained luxury sedan that  has many, many years of faultless service to give. What is wrong with these people? I mean look at it! It is a beautiful, spotless car! And the difficulty they have in killing it and the amount of time that it soldiers on bravely, plaintively whining is just painful to watch for anyone who loves cars. (I know, I know, I shouldn’t anthropomorphise cars, they hate that.) Also, the idiots laughing in the end as the Volvo bites the bullet just gets my goat.

How many perfectly good cars like this one are being destroyed and exactly why is it so essential to destroy these cars? Once it has been traded in can’t a perfectly road worthy car like this Volvo be given to a family that would never, ever be able to afford to buy a new car anyway? Why is all the energy and thought that went into the making off this beautiful piece of machinery such a short while ago, so worthless now? Anyone ?

P.S. Text updated and bad grammar fixed. WordPress was being a bitch when I was writing this post for the first, second and third time.