Unsold cars | Hacker News Reader

Unsold cars

vincelewis.net

26 pointsmmoya8 comments

"my book on conspiracy theories has no correlation whatsoever with this webpage." - well if that's what the author says, I think I can blindly believe all these bold allegations that come with no sources whatsoever (except google maps).

This was perhaps the single worst place to try to flog his conspiracy theory book.

Who really thinks a manufacturer will recycle a car rather than sell it on cheap? Come on. This was on zero hedge earlier and it's still bullshit now.

A complete idiot, that's who. To give one example - the Nissan Factory in Sunderland has a huge stockpile because they keep sending cars out to all over the world. Once every week a huge ferry arrives in North Shields port and they load few hundreds of these cars to be sent off to places in Europe. Basically the author has taken pictures of stock many manufacturers keep and somehow deducted that these cars are not getting sold. Of course they are. In fact, most of these cars will already be sold before they were even delivered.

In other news, no other goods are being sold because there are warehouses stuffed full of them.

Ugh.

"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."

These companies exist to make money for their shareholders, not to act as an economic stimulus for the rest of society. Car companies frequently lay off workers and idle their production lines in response to economic slowdowns. Then, when the economy picks up, they hire the same workers back. (The workers don't really have anywhere else to go that will pay them comparable wages.) And if there's no revenue coming in from car sales, how are they going to pay those employees to make more cars? How are they going to buy the materials to build new cars?

A private company could never work this way, only a government (like the "Five Year Plans" in the Soviet Union, in which state-owned companies were manufacturing piles of goods that people didn't need).

"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."

No, they probably haven't been sold yet, but they've been shipped off to dealers in other countries to be sold. It's not economical to build or export cars a few at a time, so they're going to be moved in large batches. "I don't believe" is hardly a convincing argument for anything.

Many of the photo's are old and I remember seeing some of them before…

I haven't searched extensively but here's article from 2009 with many of the same images - http://www.businessinsider.com/unsold-cars-around-the-world-...

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-automotive-industry-is-in...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com