Ford may even need to consider a tie-up with rival Volkswagen, with whom it formed a series of alliances last year. Ford has downplayed such speculation. The impact of the coronavirus pandemic has been twofold for the auto industry, first in the form of the ongoing slump in demand.
Sales started the year out well and things looked good until the latter weeks of winter. Then the bottom fell out, with March sales tumbling by about 39 percent. Power, warned early in April that sales could plunge as much as 80 percent as most of the country went into lockdown to try to reduce the spread of the coronavirus.
It helped that manufacturers rushed in with hefty new incentives, and the fact that many dealers have rapidly adopted new strategies to work around pandemic lockdowns, including online retailing and contactless deliveries.
New car dealer lots are overflowing and manufacturers have had to lease space to handle all the excess vehicles they produced before factories were forced to shut down in March. Dziczek points out that in spite of the bailout and revival of some auto-dependent communities, many union autoworkers are worse off in terms of income than before the Great Recession. Dziczek said the bailout did save the domestic automakers, and prevented catastrophic economic decline for auto-dependent communities across the Upper Midwest.
She said hundreds of thousands of autoworker jobs were saved as well, though many union autoworkers have lost ground economically. This story is part of Divided Decade , a yearlong series examining how the financial crisis changed America. Correction Nov. The text has been corrected. Our mission at Marketplace is to raise the economic intelligence of the country. Marketplace helps you understand it all, will fact-based, approachable, and unbiased reporting. Generous support from listeners and readers is what powers our nonprofit news—and your donation today will help provide this essential service.
Skip to content. Divided Decade. Mitchell Hartman Nov 13, Share Now on:. From left, G. Richard Wagoner Jr. As it happened, it was also the right thing to do, and we should be all grateful that he did it. Bush, of course, was a lame-duck President by the time he decided to rescue G. With Texas and retirement beckoning, he had the freedom to act as he thought best. John Cassidy has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since He also writes a column about politics, economics, and more for newyorker.
Bush Joe Biden. They are fighting back. They want to preserve their economy. They want to preserve these activities for their citizens. A sometimes overlooked potential consequence of taking no action was how hard that might have hit survivors — Ford and foreign firms operating in the U.
While they may have sold more cars — although just how many is questionable if we had slipped into a real Depression — many of their suppliers would have been wiped out, potentially causing untold challenges with supply chains and competition for resources. For those less worried about what might happen to foreign carmakers in the U.
The Tribune article references a report from Cars. The article goes on to note that the Honda Odyssey is built in Lincoln, Ala. Meantime, the largest exporter of U. Here is another little understood notion: The preservation of GM and Chrysler has helped sustain Detroit and nearby parts of Canada as a highly significant center of innovation. As a source of patents and other innovations, that region now greatly exceeds many other parts of the country, even in areas of high tech, MacDuffie points out.
And while not long ago there was black humor about the last person in Detroit turning out the lights, a quiet but dramatic reversal has been underway. It has the headquarters of some kind from almost every big automaker and big supplier all over the world. Some Silicon Valley operations are partnering with the Detroit manufacturers and others, and setting up high-tech ventures there as self-driving cars and electric cars advance.
According to MacDuffie, yes. The future for automakers is anything but a straight line. There are unprecedented new competitive challenges to the Big Three from upstarts like Tesla and high-tech companies dedicated to becoming self-driving car leaders. There are also structural and lifestyle challenges. Car share programs and disruptors, like Uber and Lyft, are allowing more city dwellers and others to avoid car ownership altogether, or to have one-car households versus two cars.
Working at home, mass transit use, walking and biking seemed to be taking up most of the difference.
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