Dramatic slump seen in vehicle sales

[Nono]

Quote by: Rick By 1990 ...

In 1980 and 1990, it was exactly the same club consuming the stuff. That club's membership has now skyrocketed, so all bets are off.

In an article entitled It's Better to Cry Wolf Now Than to Wait Until the Oil Has Run Out, The Guardian's George Monbiot pointed out last month that predictions on oil supplies from the most knowledgeable sources are a study in contradiction.
What is certain, however, is that
1) they aren't infinite
2) a record number of people are consuming them at an increasingly rapid rate. (Oh, and the climate is changing too.)
Something's gotta give.

Thomas Robert Malthus has long been the laughing stock of techno-optimists like your man Simon. My bet is on Malthus having the last laugh.

[RickSp]

Malthus has been proven wrong for quite a while. Not a perspective that I would bet on. I'll stick with Adam Smith, a contemporary of Malthus.

[jose]

CHICAGO - General Motors Corp. and bankrupt former subsidiary Delphi Corp. will offer early retirement incentives to more than 125,000 factory workers, the companies said on Wednesday, after reaching a cost-cutting deal with the United Auto Workers union.

The deal, which capped a week of intensive negotiations in Detroit, moves the world’s largest automaker toward its goal of cutting 30,000 jobs by 2008 and helps avert the threat of a strike at Delphi that could have crippled GM and cost the automaker $5 billion per month.
The job cuts come as GM, which posted a $10.6 billion loss in 2005, struggles to cut its fixed costs and halt a slide in market share.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11957866/
will GM go under?

[bishop]

another one of gm's management's stupid ideas imo... i can't see many workers, particularly unionized workers, accepting the payout deal..

what gm should do, imo, is eliminate its dividend - which costs approx. $1.2 billion every year. a company, like gm, that is on the verge of bankruptcy has no business paying $2/share in dividends every year.. about 90% of the company's shares are held by institutional investors (primarily mutual funds) and the rest are being shorted by individual investors. there is absolutely no reason, other than a pathetic attempt to give the appearance of having their act together, why gm should still be paying out dividends.

[zynner]

Honda makes great cars. They also make great race car engines (the best in the Indy series), lawnmowers and other engines. Toyota is or will soon become the #1 car seller in the world. Daimler-Benz has turned around the boring, ugly Chrysler product into a winner (relative to GM and Ford). It's called: competition -- and the competition does it better.

GM and Ford make unattractive cars. The best they can do lately is revamp golden oldies (Mustang, old Camaro). They have legacy costs from the good years when they and the unions created a system that is now killing both the companies and the union. Of course, both companies have huge pensions payouts. Did you also know that GM actually has people on the payroll -- not retirement, but active payroll today -- who do not actually do anything? How can you compete with a business model like that? (You'd think they were USSR cars -- lol).

Lack of creativity, resting on your laurels, bad management, union demands, lots of things. The Chinese will soon be next up in the auto wars, anyway. Let GM and Ford die on the vine if they can't compete. So what? Life goes on and the only thing constant is change.

~ zynner

[Osborn F Enready]

Zynner, I agree with you almost completely.

I do think that if Ford, Chevy and Chrysler would have STUCK with what worked, they would be doing just fine. Their constant desire to drive up production costs with extremely high R&D costs due to silly small game focus. All of the big three spend too much on R&D and don't diversify their selection enough. They forgot what worked for them, and the percentage of the market that was based under $20,000 in new car budget. They floated the market falsely for many years with stupid credit schemes and the invention of "leasing". Now they are blaming it on high labor costs, and trying to worm out of promised obligations they should have scrutinized on the outset and took a stand against at the beginning if they took fault.

This loophole with companies skating out on pensions and retirement plans, is bullshit. It is corporatist abuse of our system, and patently bad contract law.

[tman_ndsu08]

Quote by: Sean What/who is to blame the most here?

Shitty cars that no one wants.

[tman_ndsu08]

Quote by: Nono The fact is that the cheap-oil bubble has allowed the human population to explode, and there are now six-billion-plus people -- here, now -- and we're hungry, thirsty and materially ambitious. The whole edifice is going to collapse if alternative energy sources don't start performing the same service much faster than they look like they will.

Supply and demand.

As the demand for energy remains at a constant rate of growth and the fossil fuel supply runs out, we'll seemlessly switch to non fossil fuel supplies.

We'll have to. There demand will be there.