Nissan UK stores car on expensive test track

More photos here courtesy of the Guardian 

This photo is amazing. First, I would like to know why Nissan would build a test track in the U.K. Are UK drivers really that different from Japanese drivers? Nissan and its predecessor, Datsun, did fine for 20 years before building a test track in the UK. Second, it shows us how bad the car industry is, that Nissan thinks it is OK to use a test track, with its very expensive smooth track, as storage. There are three rows of cars in some places and two rows in others. This track has room for more!

Wikipedia says: “In 2005 the overall median age for automobiles was 8.9 years, a significant increase over 1990 when the median age of vehicles in operation in the US was 6.5 years”.  There were 250,851,833 cars in the USA in 2005. 

So the age of a car went from 7 years to 9 from 1990 to 2005, a time that the US economy was doing really well, from the stock market boom to the dot com boom to the real estate boom.

Now that we are in a busted economy, the situation is even more dire for carmakers. Cars have become even more reliable. Even American cars are now worth buying again, with the Chevy Malibu beating the Toyota Camry in some surveys. 

So if the average age went from 7 to 9 years in a booming economy, how much longer do you think people will keep their cars in a bad economy? Much, much longer. My car is ten years old and runs just fine. If it breaks, I would replace the engine or the transmission or whatever instead of laying out $20,000 for a comparable new car.

The carmakers are in for a long, extended, painful downturn, even if the economy starts to recover.