Posted on 05/19/2014 7:13:34 PM PDT by jjotto
There’s a post at the Zero Hedge finance site that’s getting some attention. It’s really a repost from this site, and it includes a number of aerial and satellite photos of thousands of new automobiles that the author says are sitting on storage lots, unsold. The author claims that automobile manufacturers are continuing to churn out thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of cars that will likely never ever sell. He warns that those cars that do sell will suffer mechanical issues from having sat for so long. He claims that those cars that don’t sell are recycled and that it’s all a sham to keep assembly lines churning. The author also doesn’t know what he’s talking about...
... The original author, Vincent Lewis, is the author of a book about conspiracy theories and I get the impression that he’s a believer in such things. How much he knows about the auto industry is open to question. His post never mentions what normal inventory levels are, nor does he reveal the dates of the photographs of thousands of unsold cars that he uses. Lewis does say that when he recently checked the Sunderland track on Google’s satellite view, all those cars had disappeared. Now those of us who know something about how the car industry works might foolishly assume that in the 5 years since the photograph was taken, most of those cars were delivered to dealers. Instead of telling us how old the photo is, he expresses skepticism that they were all “suddenly” sold and then guesses (his own word) that all of those cars were sent to the crusher, so as to continue the charade that they are making and selling cars...
...Lewis takes the effort to provide the timestamp on a photo of a storage lot near the port of Sheerness, UK that shows Google’s most recent view of the port from outer space. While there are indeed thousands of cars sitting at the port, what Lewis doesn’t tell you is that Sheerness is one of the leading ports for the importation of cars to the United Kingdom. While manufacturers do inventory thousands of cars somewhere near the assembly plants where they are built, they’re not likely to take the expense of putting them on a boat and shipping them overseas for storage there...
That definitely sounds like ZeroHedge nuttery. Thanks jjotto.
I googled the nearby Hyundai plant, and it had a mostly empty lot. However, there have been times when it was completely full, and they had to park cars at a nearby racetrack. The last time I was near that track, they had plenty of room to race. Sometimes transport cannot keep up with supply. Hundreds of cars roll off of the line or the ship. There are not always enough trucks or rail cars available to move them all at once. Now, if there were some 2010 models with the plastic still covering the seats on those pictured lots, there might be something to the story.
A few bogus stories is a small price to pay for a website that breaks important stories an analyzes complex situations in a manner utterly unlike anyone else. Catching the leader of the ECB in a bold-faced lie about there being no Plan B (to break up the Eurozone), for example. “When things get important, you have to lie.”
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