Trade in your clunker data for new data

You can download data on 677,081 cars traded in the Cash for Clunkers program from Cars.gov. The AP has already analyzed it and found that one in seven of the new vehicles purchased in exchange get only a few miles per gallon more than the so-called clunkers:

The single most common swap — which occurred more than 8,200 times — involved Ford F150 pickup owners who took advantage of a government rebate to trade their old trucks for new Ford F150s. They were 17 times more likely to buy a new F150 than, say, a Toyota Prius. The fuel economy for the new trucks ranged from 15 mpg to 17 mpg based on engine size and other factors, an improvement of just 1 mpg to 3 mpg over the clunkers.

Some of the data that would make it easier to spot fraud -- like the names of the consumers who traded in the clunkers -- has been excised.

I downloaded and played with it a bit. You need to be cautious because there's some data strangeness in there, such as multiple clunker odometer readings of 9,999,999 miles, and clunkers whose model year is listed as 2008, but here's my quickie state-by-state visualization on Many Eyes of clunkers per 10,000 people:



There are more clunkers per capita in the North than in the South and West. I'm guessing that has something to do with the amount of salt on the roads.

Here's the number of clunkers traded in by model year, which just makes all the more obvious that I missed a golden opportunity to trade in my 1995 Saturn. Turns out 1995 was the peak clunker year.