Too Many Cars

For a long time I've felt that the US car market was headed for a major fallout. The problem I see in the automotive market is the incessant manufacturing and purchasing of cars. As the world has sped up, and as people have become more selfish and engrained in consumerism, so has the automotive market increased it's speed. I read a statistic the other day, I'll source it and be more specific once I find it again, stating that people who used to buy cars on a 10 year cycle are now buying them at 5 and people who used to be on a 5 year cycle, now buy a new car every 3 years. Again, this is a major generalization of a somewhat generalized survey, but you get the point. Buying and selling of goods as expensive as cars (and with their shelf life)
at this rate is not sustainable and just plain isn't good for anyone.

The raw materials, the amount of money wasted on marketing, producing and shipping these cars it doesn't take a lot of complicated math to figure out it can neither be sustained by the earth or by car manufacturers themselves. And we've seen it in recent years, in order to entice buyers out of their new cars and into newer cars, they have to constantly add features, cut prices, and cut costs. Luckily that hasn't resulted in a bunch of rolling death traps thanks to safety regulations and the high quality of the overseas product coming in to compete.

What's happening though is that they are squeezing all of the profit out of the cars, so they are suffering, and putting pressure on their suppliers (partner companies that supply most of the parts for the manufacturing process) to cut costs, so much so that they are suffering and dying off one by one. This threatens car production as parts are simply not available, and will mean layoffs when the car companies can't produce cars. The REALLY bad thing about this is that car companies love to cut jobs in the 10s of thousands...all at once. Which has bankrupted entire towns in the past.

So, we'll see where this all leads as the big 3; Ford, Chevrolet, and Chrysler, continue their downhill slides, as gas prices continue on their express elevator to infinity, and people continue to be motivated by the selfish need to have the biggest, newest, bestest of everything, unless of course it starts to affect their pocketbook negatively, then they're suddenly into green living.