The Guardian predicts the beginning of the end for America’s car romance:
America’s love affair with the automobile could be sputtering to an
end. Some 14m cars were taken out of action in 2009, 4m more than
rolled off the assembly lines and onto the roads, a report from the Earth Policy Institute said today.It
was the first time more cars were scrapped than sold since the second
world war, reducing the size of the US car fleet from an all-time high
of 250m to 246m.
Fewer cars and more public transportation would be a perfectly fine development — for commute times, and the environment, and our dependence on foreign energy, and so forth. But I don’t know that this doomsday analysis is entirely fair.
The first half of 2009 was so incredibly devastating for car sales — February was the worst month
in 30 years — that it skews the overall numbers. If you include the
government Cash for Clunkers program last summer and the last few
months of car sales, you get something that looks like a recovery.
Overall car and light truck sales were up 15%
in December 2009 over 2008, despite worries that the Cash for Clunkers
program would cram all of the pent-up car demand into the span of a
couple weeks in July. Ford, in particular, closed 2009 on an incredible run with sales up one-third from 2008.
