What's Wrong With This Picture?: More of a Rhetorical Question Edition
Published: June 18th, 2009
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It looks like there is a slow downward trend. And capacity utilization has never been this low in the post-war era.
@Bertel Schmitt: Colour me confused. Given that anything below 80% is considered bad, and that blue squiggle seems to be below the 80% mark about half the time (even ignoring the last few years)... Isn't the logical conclusion that the auto industry as a whole was never in a "good" condition? Ever? There doesn't seem to be many five-year intervals where the total utilized capacity is above 80% more than it's below it.
That there are no pie and bar graphs in a proper PowerPoint presentation in a conferance room at the Holiday Inn.
If you scrape out half of today's auto production capacity, you'd approximate the level that the rest of industry is experiencing today. Dealer culling looks like peanuts compared to the culling that needs to happen at the factory level. And 200-600 day inventory on so many models means GM and C ought not to restart until the end of 2009. Or later.