The pics I checked (when this was posted on Peak Prosperity) are of port cities with no dating etc. So bogus. There is plenty of dealer space to channel stuff. For car and motorcycle manufacturers in USA a sale is registered when product ships from factory, not when sold to end user.

Amazing. It's right off the pages of AS.

My first brand new car I ordered from the factory. $3,000. Now that same car (new model of course) is $40,000+.

Aren't the unions playing a huge role in this? Having to down size would reveal the truth. People who buy a new car should at least get pictures of the 3 other cars they also bought that are rotting in a lot somewhere. I guess cash for clunkers didn't quite work the way they hoped. DUH.

this morning I heard on the news that every state in the union except rhode island was at 6 % or less with respect to their unemployment situation. r.i. is at 8 %.
for all who believe this b-s I will happily sell you the Brooklyn bridge with the option of adding toll booths. welcome to the new usa leading 3rd world country in the world.

When GM's bailout was just beginning a gentleman that has a house behind me on the lake could only keep saying we need a third party candidate because if GM went bankrupt that meant his retirement would go from a little over $50,000/year to about $750.00/month. Whether this was hogwash or not he was scared to death. Then the bailout came and he has not said another word. My biological father worked for GM and before he passed a year ago I asked him what do I do to get my retirement from GM since I helped bail them out of trouble. He told me "I guess you just go down to the union office and fill out the appropriate papers to get my retirement". I never did, but just wanted to hear his response. I heard all the horror stories from him personally and I took them at face value. When my dad separated from my mom we lived in Texas and I grew up in a right-to-work law state and the word union was a bad word in my vocab. I did not agree with him at all as I grew older and he knew it. Do not get me wrong we did eventually agree to disagree because he was my dad. Whether or not these pics. are true or not it is a shame still on those manufacturers practices.

I noticed a couple references to Snopes throughout the comments. Beware, as Snopes is sometimes, but not always correct, perhaps by design. It was started by a husband and wife, VERY liberal couple, who sometimes play loose with discrediting certain things they do not like. My e-mail group has learn to beware of believing all their comments. We have found some outright lies on those pages.

Please do not post items that are not true. It only clutters the internet. http://www.snopes.com/photos/automobiles...

Yeah, someone sent me that breathless link a few days ago. That's why I have the Snopes.com link on my home page, with the advice of 'click and check before forwarding that email!'

http://www.snopes.com/photos/automobiles...

You may not like their liberal-defending slant, but they called bullshit on that article, too.

Back in the 80's a guy named Iacocca went to Chrysler. At the time they were the #6 manufacturer in the world. After meeting all the guys in the boardroom, Lee called down to accounting to get a balance sheet. He wanted to know what they owned and what they owed. After an hour or so no one had brought him the balance sheet. Coming from Ford, where things were already computerized, this seemed an unusually long wait for and accounting document.

So, he went down to the accounting department to meet those guys and see what was going one. He caught them... weighing invoices to estimate how much Chrysler owed it's suppliers. If you weigh 100 invoices, then total the amount of dollars, you can calculate the estimated total with a scale. This was just one of many problems. Instead of manufacturing to demand, they were manufacturing to their profit target then forcing dealers to take and hold cars, or holding inventory themselves.

CUT TO THE CHASE: Iacocca had to tell the union we don't have any $16/hr jobs. We have some $12/hr jobs for guys that like to build cars. He had to figure out the debts and put those guys on a schedule so they could be paid in a logical manner. And most of all, they had to have a product and a pitch people would buy. That's when the add campaign offering $50 cash if people would try a Chrysler and then purchase another brand. "Find a better car and I'll give you $50." By lowering wages and restructuring debt Iacocca lowered Chrysler's Breack Even Point by about 35%, meaning all those extra cars were no longer necessary, and they started earning a profit about 35% sooner.

There stock hit a low of about $2, a few years later it was +$50. I would have given anything to have bought a couple thousand shares at $2, but like so many people in the Carter years I was struggling to buy Macaroni and Cheese. In 2009 when Ford went to $1.91, I did all I could do. The saving of Chrysler back then was very different from the union carve out in the Obama era. Both Chrysler and GM will be lucky if they don't fail again because of the union ownership and the legacy costs for retired union members. Neither of these classes would have gotten special treatment in a text book bankruptcy. With this "fix" these companies are still paying for "unfunded liabilities" with each sale. This depletes other areas a successful company spends, like R&D. I noticed one picture had a field full of Dodge Durangos. They apparently deserve the real lesson of capitalism. Creative destruction.

Where can I buy one? I have a friend who needs a car at a reasonable price.

Just one correction I have to offer to the article's writer: the article ends with a note to the effect that General Motors moved production to China and is importing the cars from there and stockpiling them. That is false. The cars made in China are sold in China. The Chinese market is the one profit-making part of General Motors at the moment. They opened the factories in China to meet the Chinese demand, not to import the cars back to the US.

I'm skeptical of this, since it strains all logical credibility. I'm not saying it's wrong. So far, I just have been unable to corroborate this story from any credible 2nd source. I did find a reference to temporary staging/storage areas for lease vehicle fleets and port shipments. The link above showed several pics from UK. Perhaps this is more of an issue with car union agreements in Europe?

Again, I'm not saying it's necessarily untrue, but this story blows my mind... lf true, it's the dumbest business decision-making I've heard of in a long time...

Are there any lots full of subarus? They're none union, right?

It just goes to show that there are some who are so scared of prices going down that they will do just about anything to try and prevent it. They also tend to use, encourage or push huge debts as a means of showing others that things are growing. When prices go down, savers can buy more, while debtors can buy even less.

Wow. Just wow.

Is it time for Cash for Clunkers 2?!

That's just unimaginable! I'm rarely speechless, but.....

about 20 years ago, as a CAP [Civil Air Patrol] adviser/evaluator for the USAF, I spent a little while at a decommissioned airbase near Spring Hill, Tennessee. the old Stewart AFB, SE of Nashville, was full of parked trucks & cars ... from the nearby Nissan plant. as a manufacturing engineer, I would say that it represented the unwillingness of Nissan to run their factory at anything but full grunt. build up an inventory, then have a factory shutdown for upgrades and maintenance -- that kind of thing.
(the problem is that their inventory degrades while stored out-in-the-weather!)
could this be a factor? -- j

As usual, there is another part to this "story" :> http://jalopnik.com/that-zero-hedge-arti...

Be careful - those photos are old... that, or Honda and Nissan (and Chrysler for that matter) have decided to scrap their current models for those they produced 5-10 years ago.

Also, most of those vehicles are in transit to the dealerships that ordered and paid for them... if you ever go to a major auto importation point (I worked next door to one for 4 years) , you will see this same scenario - they unload a car transport ship (or 2 or 3), and then rail them out to the various terminal destinations to be trucked to wherever.

Because, think of this... if it cost you X dollars per unit of manufacture, and you weren't turning over the product, how can you pay your workers, shareholders, and bills? Even if the Cost/sale ration were 100:1, eventually you're going to look at all of this and realize it costs too much to keep the factories open, and start layoffs and shutdowns.

Unless, of course, you're government subsidized, and are required to manufacture X units per month as a condition of your bailout...

I cannot delete the link, but it appears many of these pictures are old-from 2009 and the source is questionable. I'm pretty disappointed, since Zero Hedge is quite reliable as a source.