This is based on an article that popped up on my Facebook news feed this morning :Where Worlds Unsold Cars Go To Die. Briefly, it points out a surplus in production of cars over current demand as evidenced by large parking lots full of unsold cars around the world, asserting this is a disgraceful waste and the world will soon to overrun by excess cars.
Right off the bat you get an obviously biased statement "one of the topics covered in detail on these pages has been the surge in such gimmicks designed to disguise lack of demand and end customer sales". Right off the bat this raises alarm bells because annual sales figures are available for all publicly traded companies so the idea that simply hiding unsold cars would hide a drop in sales is silly.
The article follows by implicitly and explicitly saying that demand for new cars has dropped despite the fact that car sales have been rapidly increasing since the end of the recession. Furthermore the article repeatedly assumes the cars will never be sold even when presented with evidence to the contrary when one of the storage spaces mysteriously empties of cars: "Currently May 16th, 2014, all of these cars at the Nissan Sunderland
test track have disappeared? Now I don't believe they have all suddenly
been sold." They conveniently forget that Google Maps photos is not updated even every month and that the original picture of the track filled with cars is at least 5 years old. Only one of the Google Maps images is accompanied with any information that would allow a reader to check it themselves and none of the photos are referenced with date, location, or source, rather we are instructed to 'trust' that they are what the author says they are: "None of the images on this webpage are of ordinary car parks at shopping malls, football matches etc. Trust me" However, looking closely at the images makes it doubtful all of them are from long-term holding facilities since the cars are parked only two deep so that all vehicles are immediately accessible which is extremely inefficient space-wise when compared to the other pictures showing cars parked multiple layers deep. Furthermore some of the pictures show cars of different sizes which is unusual since cars in a holding lot are expected to be identical make. Compare that to the photos accompanying this article on the same topic where all but one show cars parked multiple layers deep and all show cars which are the same model.
The article also makes ridiculous assertions about the change in demand for cars. "Gone are the days when the family would have a new car every year, they are now keeping what they have got" I'm pretty sure there was never a time when the typical family in any country bought a new car every year, rather even the car manufacturers know it is more common for cars to be replaced once they reach 7-12 years of age when they require more expensive maintenance, an age range that more and more cars are falling into because of the drop in sales in 2008.
Finally the article ends by discussing how cars degrade if not maintained over several years without any estimate for how long it would take to turn-over the current stock of cars (Businessweek estimates it is 60-85 days, aka 2-3 month, for the USA). So the proposition that these cars will be waste to be given out for free, or have to be recycled because they have corroded is pure fiction.
