LITTLE ROCK — From Vermont to California, exhausted but appreciative car dealers watched their lots grow empty as crowds rushed to trade in gas guzzlers during the final weekend of the popular "cash for clunkers" program.
The hectic pace of the $3 billion rebate program accelerated in the final weekend, after the government announced that the program would end at 7 p.m. today, two weeks earlier than expected.
Adding to the urgency, some dealers had said they would stop cash for clunkers sales even earlier to make sure the government reimbursed them for the rebates - or because they didn't have enough eligible cars left.
In the final hours, customers streamed in.
"We thought about it a couple weeks ago," said Annette Palmer, 51, at Town and Country Honda in Berlin, Vt., on Saturday with her husband. They hoped to trade in a 1999 Jeep Grand Cherokee for a Honda CR-V.
"We kind of dragged our feet. Then we heard it was closing and we picked up our feet and ran," she said.
Standing outside one of his Hyundai dealerships in Appleton, Wis., John Bergstrom said customers traded in 100 clunkers throughout his fleet of 20 dealerships on Saturday and 100 the day before. They were his two biggest sales days during the clunkers program.
"That's about as good as it gets," Bergstrom said. "It's goingout with a bang."
At Universal City Nissan in Los Angeles, Alberto Vasquez said keeping up with the pace of the program has taken a toll on employees. Some labored past midnight to wrap up last-minute deals.
"Are we tired? Definitely," said Vasquez, the dealership's director of training. "But it's also bittersweet, because we're happy that we're selling cars."
Cash for clunkers has been wildly successful in spurring newcar sales and getting gas-guzzling models off the road, though some energy experts have said the pollution reduction is too small to be cost-effective. Customers receive rebates of between $3,500 and $4,500, depending on the improvement in fuel efficiency from their old vehicle to their new one. As of early Friday, nearly half a million cars had been sold through the program.
But the new sales left many dealers worried about not being reimbursed by the government. As of Friday, dealers had been reimbursed for just a small fraction of the billions in sales.
Some dealers chose to stop participating over the weekend so they could have enough time to process and file the paperwork, including AutoNation Inc., the nation's largest auto-dealership chain.
Martin Main Line Honda in the Philadelphia suburb of Ardmore stopped its cash for clunkers sales at noon on Saturday.
But by late afternoon there were still groups of people wandering the lot.
General sales manager Michael Freeman said the program had been "overwhelming," with 115 clunker sales and big surges in customer traffic at the start and now at the end. He's aiming to get the final stack of paperwork filed before tonight's deadline.
"I have people upstairs, that'sall they're doing - paperwork," he said. "The backlog is a nightmare, and it's starting to be a nightmare at the end." Information for this article was contributed from Los Angeles by Alex Veiga, from Columbus, Ohio, by Andrew Welsh-Huggins, from Philadelphia by Ron Todt and from Berlin, Vt., by David Gram of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 3 on 08/24/2009