The steep decline in worldwide car sales is causing automakers to stash over-produced cars in unlikely places, like on Nissan’s UK test track above. Below, a gallery of places other automakers are stashing un-sold cars.
Since the problems of over-productions are global, we’ve put together a selection of photos of cars stacking up around the world. Sometimes they’re being stacked in strange places like the above shot from Nissan’s test track. Usually, the location is more pedestrian with recently produced cars plopped out front of the factories they’re produced at. For instance, Land Rovers and Jaguars are now being stacked up outside a plant in Liverpool. Similarly, Ford F-150s are piling high in Detroit near their assembly facility.
I have a couple spaces in my driveway they can use. See gallery here.
Wow, what a waste. So sad.
Leave it up to us South Africans to find a solution to these problems 😉
http://www.news24.com/News24/South_Africa/News/0,,2-7-1442_2456936,00.html
Anyone know a good car jacker??
We have an auto/ship terminal at the end of the bay here in town and I have not seen one of their ships in two months because the lots are all full!
Do they really need to pre-build all those cars??
What happened to ordering a car?
I had to wait 6 months for my Porsche.
It’s interesting to see what the color mix is…
Yes, there was a time long ago when you could order a car exactly the way you wanted it and they would then build it for you. You had to wait at least a couple of months and that made a hell of a lot more sense than cranking out thousands of cars and storing them. I guess it has something to do with that instant gratification thing.
why is supply and demand not coming into play here?
i got i couple of thousand i could spare……
Most will be sold but some will be crushed and written off as deductables.
#6. Just wait
Call it a 21st-century crop circle.
Who made it–aliens?
Of a sort. Most people call them Republicans, though.
I saw a commercial last night for a car company talking about their great new car and then I noticed they kept saying “the 2008” (I think it was a kia, but I’m not sure) I wonder if it was a mistake, the local car dealer was running an old ad (although it was a generic commercial for the car not for a specific dealership) or if they were just trying to unload their 2008 model cars?
During my undergrad I spent a couple summers working for a factory that made door latches for Honda and Chrystler. They were big on minimizing storage and just-in-time production. I wonder why the actual car factory isn’t doing the same thing?
“why is supply and demand not coming into play here?”
Because labor contracts make it difficult to shut down production when the manufacturing capacity is not needed.
Big labor usually fucks up everything it touches.
Auto unions and education unions are the two that jump to my mind first.
PARTS labor is coming SOON..
And if they would sell these for COST, they might get rid of a few..
I’d give $1000 EACh to take them off their hands and Take them apart, and SELL the parts.
But there is a problem with that. In that, MANY cars are 1 off’s EVERY year..many parts WONT interchange. WHICH is STUPID.
We are talking about a Industry that SAW how Japan was working and doing the building of Cars, and they DECIDED it wasnt worth it. They can get 2-3 Cars off an assembly line before they need to REWORK the plant…JAPAN’s design was fully MODULAR..and could be changed any time.
@12
i was thinking more on the line of there is an huge supply but not much of a demand. why has prices not dropped a significant amount?
Every problem is an opportunity in disguise.
In this case, write the cars off, cover the loss with federal cash, then do buy one get one free sales.
Instant increase in market share, and a guarantee that there will be service calls for years to come.
# 17 James Hill said, “write the cars off, cover the loss with federal cash,”
Correction: write the cars off, cover the loss with cash from the wallets of us on this blog,
The $ the Gov’t uses has to taken from our wallets 1st…
My ed union as you call it does jack for me if I don’t have students. My butt goes out the door.
This is insane. No wonder they are bankrupt.
Not an unlikely place at all !!!
The Nissan UK plant is a former ww2 RAF airfield (Sunderland) that went into local authority hands, but too close to the bigger Newcastle and Teeside Airports was not commercially viable and so was developed as an industrial estate (90%+ Nissan) and there are many former ex-RAF WW2 airfields used for motor industry purposes Racing tracks at Croft, Silverstone, Thruxton.
Snaith and many others have been car storage sites for 30+ years.
The Honda Factory at Swindon is a former airfield and aircraft plant.
The Hethel (Norfolk) Lotus Factory is on a former airfield.
Bruntingthorpe, a test track, once had the longest runway in Europe
The Top Gear BBC UK motor program is filmed in a studio that is a former aircraft hanger on an airfield Dunsfold (their test track outside is still an active airfield) and is still used by some aircraft maintenance companies (once a BAe R&D facility).
Former airfield do have an advantage over green field when storing cars – they have lots of concrete/tarmac/asphalt hard standing areas.
(all the above were ex RAF bases even if they were under RCAF, or USAAF control at some time in their history)
Damn, all those unsold boring cars. I wonder if Porsche or BMW have any unsold cars they’d like to unload cheap?
It’s like Sea Lawyer says (basically), once again the principle of Supply and Demand is shown to be useless or a sham. They can produce these cars, than then apparently pay little or no inventory tax on them. And keep them mothballed out on some company acreage, rather than sell them at a greatly reduced price. Because if they did sell them cheap, they know the bottom would fall out of their company stock, as well as their rival’s stock. These cars are probably waiting to be “reVINed” as 2009s or 2010s. And who really thinks they design and build electric cars, before they’ve offloaded this dead inventory?
And if their “proving grounds” are crammed with unmarketable cars. How are these automakers “proving” anything new they come up with. I’ll bet they’re using that stretch of highway that was built for the movie “Matrix II”, to show off their cars performance. That is when it’s not a 100% CGI’d commercial.
Six Sigma, Lean and JIT type systems don’t apply when there are unions involved. They screw things up. Well, the prevent them from even taking place 🙂
Gas prices after election going up is a no surprise. Just wondering why people aren’t really upset and rioting. Maybe they need to see it hover near $5.00/gallon again. There isn’t a reason why it’s going up.
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