GM/F/Chrysler bankruptcy is Imminent!!! Carmakers are offering up to $8,000 in incentives to move these SUVs and people still aren't buying. Sales have fallen off a cliff. The value of current SUVs on the roads have also fallen off a cliff - good luck in trying to trade it in. The leasing companies are going to also take it on the chin - as residual values come far lower than their forecasts. And all automakers will now have to focus on smaller cars which aren't even half as profitable - severely impacting future earnings.
Who wants to buy an SUV that will cost $120 to fill up each week? Time for the automakers to get smart.
It was time almost seven years ago when Muslim extremists flew planes into buildings and the US was clearly going to be getting involved, with military force, in a volatile area of the world that controlled the oil fields. Executives of these companies should all be fired for being so clearly inept to foresee the inevitable. Board members of these companies should be resigning as well for hiring the morons in the first place and for also hiring the morons that continued to overpay and commit to terrible agreements with the UAW for the past 30 years.
It all comes to costs. At 15,000 miles a year difference between 15MPG and 25 MPG is 400 gallons of gas. at $4 = $1600 a year Used SUV's have fallen 40% A 2 year old top of the line SUV has dropped from 35K to 21K 14K savings...will cover cost of extra gas. Also provide the comfort bebnefit that made SUV popular to start with. Funny how the market always finds its own "water level"
Yes, This is the fatel flaw of the US car makers. It happend in the 80's when they lost 30% of the market to the japenesse mostly for quality reasons. You think at the very least they would be pushing small car and Hybrid R&D of some sort. GM and Ford seems fearful of leading the market and are always playing catch up with Toyota/Honda
Chevy had $10,000 off on SUV/Pickups in the Austin, TX marketplace when I left to Vegas for the summer a few weeks ago (kids out of school). Here in Vegas right now there seem to be about the same type of deals....the dealers will sell below invoice into their "holdback" for overstocked SUV/Pickups these days. Dodge has over 90 day inventory on trucks, they will probably be giving them away with free gas soon to free up lot space.
I figure that in about 3 months, I'll be able to go onto a dealer's lot and ask, "how much you pay me to take one of these off your hands?..."
Americans though are more affected by perception than their ability to do basic math.....this is a major problem for the automakers! The automakers use this same mathless consumer weakness to jam buyers into horrible car deals with huge gross (front end and back end gross)...now this same "perception influenced" mathless consumer weakness is bitting them in the butt....too funny!!!