Yet Another Tsunami Victim: Used Car Sales In Japan
Logic makes you think that used cars sales would skyrocket at the moment in Japan. The auto industry barely has started producing and will not be back to normal before the end of the year. Hundreds of thousands of cars have been destroyed. In Japan’s Miyagi Prefecture alone, 146,000 cars are estimated to have been severely damaged or destroyed, 10 percent of the 1,540,000 cars registered in the Prefecture. Used cars should be flying off the lots. But the opposite is true.
April saw the second lowest level of used car sales since their statistics were recorded starting in1978, the Japan Automobile Dealers Association told The Nikkei [sub]. Used car sales dropped 9.8 percent on the year to 309,693 vehicles in April, their fifth straight month of decline. Why? Lack of trade-ins. Supplies of used cars were tight before the quake, because new cars sales had been down. With new car sales down by 51 percent in April, inventory of trade-ins became even tighter.
Logic was rehabilitated in the quake-stricken Tohoku region where used car sales increased. People there had no other choice than buy used cars, sometimes at new car prices.
Bertel Schmitt comes back to journalism after taking a 35 year break in advertising and marketing. He ran and owned advertising agencies in Duesseldorf, Germany, and New York City. Volkswagen A.G. was Bertel's most important corporate account. Schmitt's advertising and marketing career touched many corners of the industry with a special focus on automotive products and services. Since 2004, he lives in Japan and China with his wife <a href="http://www.tomokoandbertel.com"> Tomoko </a>. Bertel Schmitt is a founding board member of the <a href="http://www.offshoresuperseries.com"> Offshore Super Series </a>, an American offshore powerboat racing organization. He is co-owner of the racing team Typhoon.
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I have an idea. Japan is holding about 900B of our debt and they have a huge shortage of cars/trucks. We have over capacity in the US. GM has 275,000 new trucks in their inventory. We could send them about 200,000 trucks in exchange for 6B$(30K a pop). Japan exports millions of cars/trucks a year to the US. The least they could do is buy about 200K of our trucks and help out auto workers in the US, you know in exchange for all the money the US spends with their military bases protecting Japan. None of this is obviously going to happen.
Never mind the steering wheel is on the wrong side. OTOH, we were told if the U.S. auto industry went to metric bolts and nuts, exports would skyrocket. How's that going?
May want to run a carfax on that vehicle for water damage.
"in the quake-stricken Tohoku region where used car sales increased. People there had no other choice than buy used cars, sometimes at new car prices." Can't someone from Tohoku take the train to Kyushu, buy a car there and drive it back? Or does that involve a lot of bureaucratic red tape?