Originally Posted by Billybob

Ah! The benefits of higher education!

What's the difference between the "scrap value" of a running car versus the “scrap value” of a non-running car last time you checked?

The "scrap value" is determined based upon the weight of the scrap in question not whether the engine which constitutes scrap is running or not. The condition of the engine is irrelevant whether "steel is down or up"!

You don’t see a problem here maybe because you didn’t have money due you not paid to you. The law is clear dealers where required to notify buyers of the provision and then buyers could negotiate with the dealers regarding anything more than $50 value of their trade in. If the dealer did not inform you of the provision they violated the law and are subject to fines per violation for each their failures. There where 800,000+ cars scrapped as a result of the CFC assuming dealers only received $100 per car that is a theft from the consumer of up to $40,000,000.

You obviously have little knowledge of the auto scrap business or you would know that a recycler will come to you and pay you the going “auto scrap steel spot” rate, on Friday in Boston $125 a ton for any vehicle and will gladly do so for a dozen vehicles. You’d likely get a couple cases of beer or bottles of liquor in appreciation. The cost of transportation of scrap to the recycler is very often born by the scrap buyer. There is an entire industry of independent truck owners who contract with recyclers to transport scrap to there facilities. Even scrap recyclers make the effort to segregate out high value items such as good used tires, petroleum fluids, catalytic converters, alloy wheels etc. that create quite the differential between the auto scrap steel spot price paid and the overall value of their return on this investment. The scrap industry is a commodity business and the people involved make their profit on volume and the spread between what they pay for raw material and what theprocessed materials are eventually sold for. Their profit per unit remains fairly constant.

If the dealers sold the vehicles to an auto parts recycler as opposed to a scrap recycler the value of the condemned vehicles could be significantly higher than the scrap value and the vehicle value to the buyer would correspondingly be higher.