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posted by
martyb
on Wednesday December 19 2018, @04:34AM
from the now-they're-buying...trucks? dept.
from the now-they're-buying...trucks? dept.
General Motors has announced it's shuttering five production facilities and killing six vehicle platforms by the end of 2019 as it reallocates resources towards self-driving technologies and electric vehicles.
[...] North American car production hit 17.5 million vehicles in 2016, and dropped marginally to 17.2 million in 2017. Interesting, but perhaps not significant.
More telling are changes in driver behaviour. In North America, for example, fewer teens are getting driver's licences. In 1983, 92 per cent of teens were licensed, while by 2014, that number had dropped to 77 per cent. In Germany, the number of new licences issued to drivers aged 17 to 25 has dropped by 300,000 over the last 10 years.
Are we over our love affair with cars?
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TOO BAD YOU CAN'T BUY a voodoo globe so that you could make the earth spin
real fast and freak everybody out.
-- Jack Handey, The New Mexican, 1988.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @04:59PM
You forgot 3) Uneven regulation.
To explain, in USA the first crash and fuel economy (CAFE) regulations were much more stringent for cars than for light trucks. The result was that cars became more expensive and light trucks were a cheap way to buy a new vehicle. The car companies noticed after a few years that more and more trucks were being used like cars, so they began to civilize their truck offerings and also expanded the SUV category. Then they really pushed on the definition of "light truck" with vehicles like the Chrysler PT Cruiser (yes--that was classified as light truck for crash and mileage) so they could still build big guzzlers and have a reasonable corporate average fuel economy (CAFE). Somewhere along this slippery slope marketing caught on to the trend and glorified the truck. And here we are, the only country that I know of where there are more light trucks sold than cars.