White House Blasts Edmunds.com Over C4C Claims

In an entry on the White House blog yesterday, White House Director of New Media Macon Phillips calls Edmunds.com’s C4C analysis “faulty” and “designed to grab headlines.” The 500-word blog came in response to data released the day prior by the auto-info provider that concluded that Cash for Clunkers cost taxpayers $24,000 per vehicle sold.

At the heart of the debate is the percentage of C4C new-vehicle sales that were incremental — in other words, sales that would not have occurred without the government-funded C4C program. Edmunds estimated that number at 18%, while the White House put it in the 64%-to-81% range.

Click here to read the White House blog post.

Click here to read Edmunds.com’s response.

And here’s the original Edmunds.com Cash for Clunkers analysis.

Tags: c4c, clunkers, edmunds, white-house

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Comment by Trish Harrision on October 30, 2009 at 4:37pm: Way to go Edmunds for keeping it real.

Comment by Marcie Belles on November 5, 2009 at 10:45am: Here's another take, from SeekingAlpha.com, on Edmund's analysis of the effects of Cash for Clunkers.

Comment by David Ruggles on November 19, 2009 at 9:19pm: I'm not sure what Edmunds had to gain by putting their assertion "out there." I find their estimates to be more credible than those of the White House. The spike in new car sales came more from "buy aheads" than anything. There were probably some new vehicle sales that occurred in place of a pre-owned because of the incentives. The program had a pump priming effect and cleaned up some stale inventory. Maybe the price per vehicle wasn't $24000. per sale, but that's not far off. Incremental sales of 64% - 81% is just nuts.