I'll just pick up on the comment where scrappage was mentioned, for example. This is an area that General Motors Canada perhaps has more experience in than anyone else in the industry in Canada because of a relationship we've had with the Clean Air Foundation over the last several years. We offered our customers a $1,000 credit toward the purchase of a new car if they demonstrated they had removed a car that was 10 years or older and made sure it was scrapped from the road.
In Canada we still have over one million vehicles registered on our roads that are over 10 years old. The degree of technological improvement that has happened in terms of not just fuel economy but particularly in terms of reduction of all kinds of other emissions, particularly emissions that are health related, is extraordinary. Every time we get an old vehicle off the road and replace it with a new one, we automatically get an environmental benefit.
We found this program that we offered together, called Car Heaven, was extraordinarily positive. We were able to retire over 30,000 old vehicles from the road and we were pleased to have been awarded a Canadian Environment Award for climate change for the work, together with our partners at the Clean Air Foundation.
Around the world, in Germany we cited a program that is doing effectively the same thing, but they are providing quite a significant benefit to someone who does this trade-in, trading in the old and making sure it's scrapped. It must not come back as a second-hand vehicle. The German government is offering the equivalent of about $4,000 Canadian, and that incentive is clearly working in the German marketplace.
One lesson we would underscore is that the more straightforward and simple these programs are, as was the GM program, the more effective they are. That is one mechanism that really does help bring consumers back into the marketplace, but we have suggested a number of other ones.
You asked about regulations as well. I'd say we have seen some very positive change, with the current government taking on issues such as the bumper regulations, which had been disharmonized for a long period of time, but we still have a list of over 30 different regulations, which are often safety regulations, or others that are just slightly disharmonized in various ways. Progress is being made toward taking away that tyranny of small differences, as we call it, and it's very important because even though these differences can have no appreciable difference in terms of safety, they can cost hundreds of millions of dollars in terms of design changes that are required just to be able to bring a vehicle into the Canadian marketplace.
Again, removing some of those taxes, those barriers, are all things for the longer term that can really help the auto industry.