By Jim Brennan

UDMan

All over the car blogging community, there hasn’t been a topic quite like the Cash For Clunkers program that was extended this past week. There have been heavy debates as to the merit of this program, and why anyone will trade a perfectly good vehicle, only to have it destroyed. Well, it’s time to put this all into perspective, as I am going to take the unpopular side of explaining why this program has become somewhat successful, and why everyone who is against it should just calm down.

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I’ve always thought that KBB and Edmunds used values for late model cars were totally bogus. But as a used car buyer you are forced to contend with sellers who think their three-owner, eight year old car with no maintenance records is worth KBB retail. Up to now the closest thing I’ve seen to "real world" values is what you can find by searching completed auctions at eBay, but even that isn’t always very helpful. Well now a new site called PriceHub aims to "bring price transparency to the car buying and selling process for new and used vehicles … by providing an online database of real prices from vehicle transactions." How do they do that? They ask folks who have bought cars to enter data from the sale. Obviously, it’s not a perfect system, but I’d say it’s better than anything else out there right now. They have over 17,000 data points so far, and once it grows, it should get a lot more accurate for a wide range of vehicles. Check out the Porsche 911 data below and then go to the make/models you are most familiar with and see what you think.