SEATTLE - At the Car Hop used car dealers around the Puget Sound, the problem is not selling used cars. In fact, the one in Auburn said it's on pace to break sales records for October. Rather, the difficulty has been finding cars to fill up their lots. "A lot of them are saying there are tumbleweeds blowing through the parking lot," said Travis Smalley, manager of the Car Hop along Aurora Avenue in Seattle. "It’s been a little rough since the Cash for Clunkers ended." Several local dealers told KING 5 current gaps in used car inventory are at least, in part, due to the federal "Cash For Clunkers" program, which helped swap almost 700,000 gas-guzzling, older-model vehicles nationwide for new. "If you don't have that car because it got destroyed, you kind of lose that avenue," Tom Paulson, general manager of Toyota of Bellevue. "So you have to really start searching and digging and trying to find out where can we find a used car." But you can't just blame "Clunkers," said dealers. They already faced a shortage of used cars because not as many people are leasing cars these days – cars that eventually are sold on the used market. Also, in the down economy, many franchise dealerships that have gone belly-up have switched to selling used cars to make ends meet. "Now you got more dealers trying to buy more used cars at auctions, and there's none available," said Paulson. He says that drives up the prices of wholesale vehicles. Several dealerships did tell us now that the Clunkers program has been over for about six weeks, they're starting to see things turn around as trade-ins are filling in the gaps. Still, companies that primarily deal with people with lower credit or who cannot afford anything but the so-called clunkers have had to be more creative with how they fill their inventory, reaching even out-of-state. "Instead of buying 30 to 40 cars from one wholesaler, we have to cherry pick a little more," said Smalley.
