Posted on 05/17/2014 6:28:49 AM PDT by RightGeek
In the past several years, 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, used extensively by US automotive manufacturers, better known as "channel stuffing", of which General Motors is particularly guilty and whose inventory at dealer lots just hit a new record high. But did you know that when it comes to flat or declining sales and stagnant end demand, channel stuffing is merely the beginning?
Presenting...
Where the World's Unsold Cars Go To Die (courtesy of Vincent Lewis' Unsold Cars)
Above is just a few of the thousands upon thousands of unsold cars at Sheerness, United Kingdom. Please do see this on Google Maps....type in Sheerness, United Kingdom. Look to the west coast, below River Thames next to River Medway. Left of A249, Brielle Way.
Timestamp: Friday, May 16th, 2014.
There are hundreds of places like this in the world today and they keep on piling up...
THE WORLDS UNSOLD CAR STOCKPILE
Houston...We have a problem!...Nobody is buying brand new cars anymore! Well they are, but not on the scale they once were. Millions of brand new unsold cars are just sitting redundant on runways and car parks around the world. There, they stay, slowly deteriorating without being maintained.
Below is an image of a massive car park at Swindon, United Kingdom, with thousands upon thousands of unsold cars just sitting there with not a buyer in sight. The car manufacturers have to buy more and more land just to park their cars as they perpetually roll off the production line.
There is proof that the worlds recession is still biting and wont let go. All around the world there are huge stockpiles of unsold cars and they are being added to every day. They have run out of space to park all of these brand new unsold cars and are having to buy acres and acres of land to store them.
NOTE:
The images on this webpage showing all of these unsold cars are just a very small portion of those around the world. There are literally thousands of these "car parks" rammed full of unsold cars in practically every country on the planet. Just in case you were wondering, these images have not been Photoshopped, they are the real deal!
Its hard to believe that there are so many unsold cars in the world but its true. The worse part is that the amount of unsold cars keeps on getting bigger every day.
It would be fair to say that it is becoming a mechanical epidemic of epic proportions. If anybody from outer space is reading this webpage, we here on Earth have too many cars, why not come and buy a few hundred thousand of them for your own planet! (sorry but this is all I can think of)
Below is shown just a few of the 57,000 cars (and growing) that await delivery from their home in the Port of Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A. With Google Maps look South of Broening Hwy in Dundalk for the massive expanse of space where all these cars are parked up.
The car industry would never sell these cars at massive reductions in their prices to get rid of them, no they still want every buck. If they were to price these cars for a couple of thousand they would sell them. However, nobody would then buy any expensive cars and then they would end up being unsold. Its quite a pickle we have gotten ourselves into.
Below is shown an image of the Nissan test track in Sunderland United Kingdom. Only it is no longer being used, reason...there are too many unsold cars parked up on it! The amount of cars keeps on piling up on it until its overflowing. Nissan then acquires more land to park up the cars, as they continue to come off the production line.
UPDATE: 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. I would guess they may have been taken away and recycled to make room for the next vast production run.
Indeed next to that test track and adjacent to the Nissan factory, they are collating again as shown on the Google Maps image below. So where did the last lot go? This is not an employees car park by the way.
None of the images on this webpage are of ordinary car parks at shopping malls, football matches etc. Trust me, they are just mountains and mountains of brand spanking new unsold cars. There is no real reason why you should be driving an old clunker now is there?
The car industry cannot stop making new cars because they would have to close their factories and lay off tens of thousands of employees. This would further add to the recession. Also the domino effect would be catastrophic as steel manufactures would not sell their steel. All the tens of thousands of places where car components are made would also be effected, indeed the world could come to a grinding halt.
Below is shown just a small area of a gigantic car park in Spain where tens of thousands of cars just sit and sunbathe all day.
They are also piling up at the port of Valencia in Spain as seen below. They are either waiting to be exported to...nowhere or have been imported...to go nowhere.
Tens of thousands of cars are still being made every week but hardly any of them are being sold. Nearly every household in developed countries already has a car or even two or three cars parked up on their driveway as it is.
Below is an image of thousands upon thousands of unsold cars parked up on a runway near St Petersburg in Russia. They are all imported from Europe, they are all then parked up and they are all then left to rot. Consequently, the airport is now unusable for its original purpose.
The cycle of buying, using, buying using has been broken, it is now just a case of "using" with no buying. Below is an image of thousands of unsold cars parked up on an disused runway at Upper Heyford, Bicester, Oxfordshire. They are seriously running out of space to store these cars.
It is a sorry state of affairs and there is no answer to it, solutions don't exist. So the cars just keep on being manufactured and keep on adding to the millions of unsold cars already sitting redundant around the world.
Below are parked tens of thousands of cars at Royal Portbury Docks, Avonmouth, near Bristol in the United Kingdom. If you look on Google Maps and scan around the area at say 200ft you will see nothing but parked up unsold cars. They are absolutley everywhere in that area practically every open space has unsold cars parked up on it.
Below is that same area in Avonmouth, UK, but zoomed out. Every gray space that you see is filled with unsold cars. Anyone want to hazard a guess at how many are there...
As it is, there are more cars than there are people on the planet with an estimated 10 billion roadworthy cars in the world today.
We literally cannot make enough of them. Below are seen just a few of the thousands of Citroen's parked up at Corby, Northamptonshire in England. They are being added to daily, imported from France but with nowhere else to go once they arrive.
So there they sit, brand spanking new cars, all with a couple of miles on the clock that was consummate with them being driven to their car parks. Below is the latest May 2014 Google Maps image of unsold cars in Corby, Northamptonshire.
Manufacturing more cars than can be sold is against all logic, logistics and economics but it continues day after day, week after week, month after month, year in year out.
Below is shown a recent (April 2014) screen grab from Google Maps of the Italian port of Civitavecchia. All those little specks are a few thousand brand new unsold Peugeots. Just collecting dust and maybe a bit of salty sea spray!
Below, all nice and shiny but with nowhere to go. Red and white and black and silver, purple, pink and blue, all the colors of the rainbow and be they all brand new. Indeed all the colors of the rainbow are down there on those cars, making pretty mosaics, montages of color and still life. Maybe that is all they will now ever be, surreal urban art of the techno production age. Magnificent metal boxes, wasting space and saving grace, all sitting still, because its business at mill.
All around the world these cars just keep on piling up, there is no end in sight. The economy shouts out quite loud that nobody has the money anymore to spend on a new car. The reason being that they are making their "old" cars go on a lot longer. But we cannot stop making them, soon we will run out of space to park them. We are nearly running out of space to drive them that's for sure!
Below, more cars mount up in the port of Valencia in Spain. They will not be exported as there is nowhere for them to go, so they just sit and rot in their colorful droves.
Gone are the days when the family would have a new car every year, they are now keeping what they have got. It may be fair to say that some families still get a new car every year but its the majority that now do not.
The results are in these images, hundreds of thousands if not millions of cars around the world are driven from their factories, parked up and left.
Could we say that these cars have been left to rot! Maybe, as these cars will certainly rot if they are not bought, driven and cared for. It does not look like they will be sold any day soon, many of them have been standing for over 12 months or even longer and this is detrimental to the car.
Below, as far as the eye can see, right into the background, cars, cars and more cars. But what's beyond the horizon? Have a guess...Yes that's right...even more cars! All brand new but with no homes to go to. Do you think they will ever start giving them away, that may be the only radical solution. Who knows, you could soon be getting a free car with every packet of cornflakes.
When a car is left standing idle, all the oil sinks to the bottom of the sump, and then corrosion begins to set in on all the internal engine parts where the oil has drained away.
Cold corrosion is when condensation builds up in the cylinders and rust forms in the bores. The engines would then start to seize and would need to be professionally freed before they could be started. Also the tires start to lose air and the batteries start to go flat, indeed the detrimental list goes on and on.
So the longer they sit there the worse it slowly becomes for them. What is the answer to this? Well they need to be sold and that just isn't happening.
The epidemic is not improving, it is getting worse. Car manufactureres are constantly coming out with new models with the latest technology in them. Hence prospective buyers of, for example, a new Citroen Xsara Picasso want the latest model, not last years model. Hence all the unsold Citroen Xsara Picasso cars from the previous year will now have even lesser chance of being sold.
The problems then just keep on mounting up. In the end, the unsold cars that are say 2 years old will have no alternative but to be either crushed up, dismantled and/or their parts recycled.
Some car manufacturers moved their production over to China, General Motors and Cadillac are examples of this. They are then shipped over in containers and unloaded at ports. However they are now being told to put a big halt in their import into the U.S.A. as they just can't sell them in the quantities they would desire. Consequently Chinese car parks are now filling up with brand new American cars. Well nobody in China can afford them on their meagre pittance wages, so there they will stay until our economy improves...which it might do in a few generations.
How many formula 1 cars have you seen driving 6 months in snow and ice?
Where I live, I'll take front wheel drive over rear any day.........
As anyone who lives in Michigan for the winter.
Yep, if you go by the major ports in the US you’ll find these type lots. Check out the major auto auctions and you find hundreds or so vehicles passing thru each week. I have trouble believing that manufactures are stock piling vehicles just to keep production going. They are in the business of selling vehicles to make a profit. No sales no money coming in.
Yes. I used to live in Baltimore and drove by, on my way back and forth to work, a huge Toyota “stock yard” of cars and trucks in the port of Baltimore; cars and trucks both passenger cars and pickup trucks and many commercial and heavy duty trucks, that had just come into the port via ship and were waiting to be shipped out either by rail or truck to dealers nationwide. It was huge and on any given day, the yard was completely full, chock full to the brim of vehicles, but I also saw a lot of trains and trucks going out of this yard full of cars and trucks, moving them out while ships were bringing even more in, so while the yard often looked full, the inventory was constantly turning over, those cars were going somewhere and being replenished with new ones.
FWIW, I work only just a few miles up the road from this place.
Manheim Pennsylvania Auto Auction - World's Largest Auto Auction
I drive by this place often and the lot of cars is huge, and I mean huge! Massively huge! And the main roads coming in and out are full, often clogged full of car hauling tractor trailers bringing cars in and taking cars back out; the turnover is constant. It is one of the major employers in the area and very high tech – which considering that this is in the heart of rural Lancaster Amish farm country is rather amazing.
There are also quite a few car recon businesses and some very big discount used car dealers in the area around this auction yard. And for what is worth, while the YouTube video makes it seem as if they only deal with very high end cars, high performance sports cars, they are actually one of the major suppliers of a lot of the used or “nearly new” cars of all types for many new and used car dealerships on the east coast and all over the country in addition to selling to dealers overseas. I would guess that some of the very high end and very expensive cars come from bankruptcy sales, or tax or drug seizures, government auctions, that only represents a small part of their overall business.
And just where do most of these cares come from? They come primarily from new car dealerships when people trade their used cars when they are buying new cars. The new car dealership gives the new car buyer a trade in price, which is often actually well below the actual retail resale amount (and a dirty little secret I learned from some folks I’ve known working for car dealerships including a big auto dealer finance manager– they supposedly give you a good or even above the “blue book” and very generous trade in price, but they more than make it up on the dealer extras, like under body protection and fabric protection, upgraded floor mats and audio systems etc. and other after-market extras and the profit they make on service maintenance and or they make up for it on the kick back they get on the dealer financing, so you are only on paper getting a fair market trade in price). The new car dealers then in turn sells these traded in used cars in bulk for a small or nominal profit or at cost to a wholesale auto auction like the one in Manheim PA; they in turn spend some money to recondition these cars and make them seem as close as possible to new and they sell them back to new or used car dealers for a big mark up that is passed on to the used car buyer. Places like the Manheim Auction couldn’t survive unless people were buying new cars and trading in their used cars.
While you might get a good bargain on a used car from a new or used car dealership, most of the time you are getting ripped off.
Let the transmission go out. Then it will make sense that rear wheel drive vehicles save many many dollars in repairs. They are also usually more fuel efficient. But then some people don't mind paying that extra thousand or two plus to have the engine pulled to fix the transmission or the extra expense of CVU repairs etc. Much lower maintenance cost is the reason many persons like myself like rear wheel drive vehicles.
I do have one vehicle with front wheel drive. Its a 4X4 and I drive it in 2WD except when I need 4WD. Logically a person should only need front wheel drive if they have 4WD and yes it does cost more to maintain the front wheel drive portion.
“I can’ wait for the govt solution to this problem they created........................”
It’s called ‘Cash for Clunkers’.
Also making older cars more expensive to own via taxes, inspection fees or eliminating the ability to get spare parts for them. Mandating expensive upgrades like mileage/gps installations to tax them, and any other government scheme you can think of.
You buy cars like my dad and husband. Never ever get attached to a particular car and let the dealer know it.
That sir is a brilliant insight. I’m embarrassed that I didn’t see the fact my self.
There is a third possibility for French cars...... under qualitied
No, they are bought by the dealers. If the dealers don't buy, they are not sold. If they are not sold, they are not produced.
“The French copy no one and no one copies the French.”
Permission to steal both of those?
Guess what folks! The 2014 Cherokee is primary FWD, and AWD, sideways engine.
So, RWD-heads tell me:
Why the hell wouldn’t you want all the weight of your engine/drivetrain directly over your driving wheels for traction, instead of practically nothing?
Thanks for your input. I’ve seen the shipyard vehicles come and go and have
delivered or picked up vehicles from many auctions including Manhiem which
are located across the USA. All this shipping, buying and selling can’t take place
unless the public sector is engaged.
That is exactly how I learned my lesson. My wife fell in love with a 1986 Cougar. The salesman knew it and we were doomed. He used every trick in the book to get us to buy the car. They played each of us against each other, another salesman asked for the keys to the car 'cuz somebody else wanted to buy it, tried to make me feel like a jerk for not buying the car my wife wanted, etc. That was a long time ago and many cars since. BUT my wife stays home when I go to buy the car. And she is patient if I don't come home with it on the first try.
First off you have to understand the complicated registration system in the UK. That means that over 60% of new cars are sold in either March or September. The others over the other 10 months. That means at the build up to those months stocks build up and are stored wherever space can be found. Also, i think it’s over 70% of the cars built in the UK, that’s JLR in the Midlands and Liverpool, Toyota in Derby, Nissan in Sunderland Honda in Swindon, Bentley in Crewe and RR in Sussex, are exported. No Fords or Vauxhalls are built here anymore. This means that at any time they are building up various shipments somewhere and then they are taken to Sheerness, Avonmouth, Southampton and other docks for shipping when the ships arrive as it’s far to expensive to store them at the docks. Incidentally, the three Japanese manufacturers export lots of cars to Japan.
Anyway, that's how it is in the UK and it was always a huge frustration when I was working that the cars the customers wanted to buy were all on extended lead times, 6-8 weeks not unusual, and it was often pointed out by customers who travelled along the M5 just how many Toyotas were parked in clear view at Avonmouth. By the way, Sheerness is in Kent, on the East coast.
The overriding factor of course is that for a manufacturer to shut a factory, or even slow it down, is very, very bad PR and hugely costly. It’s a lot easier, and cheaper to give huge incentives to dealer and customer alike to force the market. At the moment, Toyota here are supplying the dealers at 30% discount on certain models, most of which is being passed on to the customers, and the customer also gets £1,000 towards his deposit from Toyota Finance if taken on a PCP (lease). Cheap as chips. Monthly payments under £100. All other makers are up to similar deals.
Whenever we come over your side I am always staggered at the new car inventories - which have to be paid for by the dealers when they are unloaded. At least here the manufacturers carry the stock - mainly because of the huge land costs which the dealers simply could not afford given the margins. Most work on a margin of 1 or 2% of turnover!! I can nag on for hours on this subject. Just glad I’m out of it all.
When I brought the check from my credit union in, the following Tuesday, the lady in the finance department was shocked “You got a good deal....you got a REAL good deal !”.
Nice!
I had a finance guy say, “This is a really skinny deal.” I did not know what that meant. Later, I found out it means that there is little profit for the dealer.
So I should buy a car optimized for conditions that are around less than 10% of the time? I’ll take a car optimized for the 90%. Every luxury car is rear wheel drive, now AWD REAR biased.
I was unaware of that term, myself. Thanks!
Steal away. It would have made him proud.
While I don’t buy this particular article based on pictures, many of which have been around for years with essentially the same sky is falling story and follow-up finds normal inventory flows with ups and downs, I agree that the Government is fully capable of stepping in with a lame-brained scheme to keep its union supporters employed when the demand isn’t there. I lived in Switzerland for a while where they had incredibly rigid inspection requirements that essentially made keeping a car more than a few years uneconomic - it was cheaper to just buy a new car than to fix the old one to the standards they had. If you ever travel there you may notice how there aren’t any clunkers, almost none in poor condition or even with body damage driving around.
Also bought a used engine from Japan for our Corolla - understand they have a required replacement at 50,000 miles - the used ones being exported to the US and other markets. Governments can come up with all kinds of crazy ideas instead of relying on simple economics, and the people truly being hurt are the ones at the bottom of the scale who can’t ever afford a new car. But that may be another of the incentives to institutionalize the liberal’s dream of mass transit for the vast majority of people.
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