I just watched "Prime Time" news which includes the world news and my local news coverage in my area. I swear nearly every single commercial was a local car dealership promoting the Cash For Clunkers program offered by the government.

One thing I always wonder is how do all these "names" come about when these bills are passed?

The bill passed by the US government was called Consumer Assistance to Recycle and Save Act of 2009. Then the government calls it CARS for short and uses the perfect domain name Cars.gov to help promote it. So far so good as shortening up the long first "bill" name makes sense.

Once at the CARS.gov site, it lists Car Allowance Rebate System under the CARS logo. Now that was name number 3 if you lost count already. Now toss in "name" number four  and you have Cash For Clunkers! Not sure where that name came from, but it’s popular.

Why does the government have to confuse people all the time!  The one funny thing is that the name being used the most is Cash For Clunkers. It’s the term used most on TV and ads in general.

So out of all the car dealerships in the world, only one can own the name that is being used the most. CashForClunkers.com name that is!

According to whois records, the current owner for CashForClunkers.com is Sonic Automotive Inc., who appears to have purchased the domain name about 6-10-2009. The domain name was first registered on 1-24-2008 to Intelligent Web Solutions and was the owner up to 6-10-2009.

My congrats goes out to SonicAutomotive.com of Charlotte, NC for "getting it" when it comes to domain names!

All the "other" auto dealerships can promote "cash for clunkers" and keep feeding the term into peoples heads, but only ONE can own CashForClunkers.com .

According to Compete.com CashForClunkers.com Last Month already had over 10,000 monthly unique visitors and I am very sure the traffic has sky rocketed the past several days as well! Not just ANY web traffic, targeted web traffic!

Sonic Automotive has built a nice site on CashForClunkers.com and is using several tools from the Dealer.com technology from what I can tell.

At posting, the most popular search term on the net is related and uses the term Cash For Clunkers in it. 2 of the top 10 terms total.

CashForClunkers.org was registered on 1-16-2009 and I can not compare when the .org site to the .com website was created, but the .org ranks #4 in natural results for the search term cash for clunkers. According to Compete.com, CashForClunkers.org for last month had over 43,000 monthly unique visitors! Again, this number likely has sky rocketed the past several days.

According to whois records, a Jeff Ownby is the owner of CashForClunkers.org and this site is more of a blog.

It is likely CashForClunkers.com is getting more Direct Navigation traffic, compared to CashForClunkers.org getting search traffic. Again, I am not sure when both sites launched, but it appears the .org did first and about by 5 months.

Are these domain names "long term investments"? They very well can be. The "blog" has a better chance at holding a following IMO but likely that both should be used "when the getting is good"!

Out of "the big 3", Ford is the only one to rank in Google the best. They went to the left and used a sub domain name cashforclunkers.ford.com .

Ford cash for clunkers sub domain used

Go figure, Ford was also the only one out of the big 3 NOT to get a bailout!

GM advertising for cash for clunkers

GM is willing to pay to rank on Google. Why not, it’s the tax payers money!