the car industry

Bad year ahead for the car industry

Tuesday, January 6th, 2009

Yesterday, I understand, was the most depressing day of the year. The news always talks about this in January and if you scoot online you can find the actual formula. I think it’s gonna be Monday 19th January actually, but that’s another post.

January is always a bit annoying, this is Midday

However, if you’re in the car industry, this week is going to be pretty hard to top, with new figures released that are more depressing than any Monday morning.

Take Japan, the sales of new vehicles dropped 22% in December, giving them their lowest ever December total. In the USA, Japanese car manufacturers didn’t fare any better than in their homeland with Honda announcing a 35% drop and Nissan a 31% fall.

Even though they’ve got a rainbow bridge, news from Japan isn’t good

Ford has said that they sold 32% fewer cars in December than it did earlier in the year. They also added that people on the street ‘Joe Six Pack’ to quote the lovely and mad Ms Palin, who were buying Ford cars had dropped 27%. Worse though, for our industry was that rental and hospitality sales in December had dropped nearly half at 42%.

The latest Ford on the production line

So, how did Chrysler fare? Well, they competed with Ford very well with crushing drops of 53% and General Motors managed a 31% loss.

Chrysler aren’t faring any better

What does this all mean? Well, apart from the obvious that we’re in a bit bother, it has been predicted that in 2009, we’ll have the lowest car sales since the last recession of 1992.

Should we all go out and buy new cars now, using Credit Cards and Balloon payments, to prop up the market or should we let them all suffer because we can’t either afford it and all new cars look the same?

I reckon we should wait – let them suffer for a bit more, out of this, we might get some truly wonderful things. Toyota built the Prius out of an experiment and now they can’t build enough of them – if all the car manufacturers were forced to innovate to attract new customers, and I don’t mean an Ipod dock and some different colours, but something unbelievable and excellent.

Is this how you innovate? More Grills!!

Imagine a 200mph electric car that can travel for 400miles between charges and only takes 15mins to charge or a hybrid car that can travel 1,000 miles between fill ups?

This may have got the CEOs to congress quicker

Look at the Iphone, it’s innovative in its field and people are climbing over the dead bodies of colleagues to get to it, if it’s new, works and is cool, people would buy it.

Let’s go one step further here – we’ve all seen Back To The Future; in my reckoning I’d say that we’re only 6 years away from hover cars and girls looking like Michael J Fox – now if a car manufacturer (even Chrysler) came up with a clean, easy to drive flying car – I’d buy that on credit even if I was earning or not!

Perhaps we’d all get flying Deloreans….

What do you think? Is the car industry worth saving as it is, or should they innovate to keep people buying new cars?