Arhivă :: Publicaţia 14/2005 :: The Point
The people in Mures county love their old cars
Only a few hundred people have taken their cars to the car dump
"Anyone can participate in this program once with a single car. Every car owner needs to pay the car tax until it is time to erase it for good", declared Lucian Cândea, chief of the commercial service in REMAT. More than that, every car needs to be fully equipped and be functional. On basis of the European principle "the polluter pays", the Environment Administration Fund initiated the campaign to collect and repair the cars which have been on the road for more than 12 years. To the surprise of everyone involved, the people of our town are not rushing to get rid of their Dacia, Trabant, Oltcit, Mercedes or Skoda cars or any other old car brands for the few bucks at stake.
Oldies but goldies
Though many cars are not worth more than a few million lei, the condition to participate in the program is discouraging for many locals. The 30 million lei are not cashed in, but transferred into the account of the producer from whom the new car wishes to be purchased. The owner has to pay an additional 5 % to the 20% of the value of the new car. The difference will be paid when the new car arrives. It seems that these conditions have made people give up. If at first there were thousands of requests in the entire county, by the end of last week the number of cars that had been ordered was 350. SC LION , authorized Dacia and Renault dealer had the most requests. The sales director of the company declared that initially there had been 470 applications. Out of these only 89 Dacia cars were ordered. There were 35 requests for Renault cars. "There is a single system in the country which functions on the principle of "first come, first served". Another accredited unit is SC SAMIO SRL from Chețani but they went through the procedures in vain. "We wasted the money. We had no inquiries. We had two promises for an Opel and a Renault, but they haven't arrived" says Sămărtinean Ioan, director of the firm. The program continues until August 25. Then the remaining funds will be allocated to other authorized firms, which will have had a high number of undelivered cars. Until then the people can decide on the type of car they would like. There have been 18 requests for Opel, 7 for Fiat, 32 for Volkswagen and none for Chevrolet.
