Too many cars, and they

“There was a car bubble,” Steven Rattner, who President Obama recruited to head a Treasury Department group charged with finding solutions to the mountain of problems facing the American auto industry, said in an interview last month. “We had this artificially high sales rate.”

During the boom years of the early and mid-2000s, automakers were selling more than 16 million cars a year in the United States. They are on pace to sell fewer than 10 million this year. General Motors posted a 44.5 percent drop in March compared with the same month a year ago. Ford’s sales tumbled 41.3 percent. Chrysler’s fell 39.3 percent. Toyota’s sales fell 39 percent, and Honda’s dropped 36.3 percent.

One of the key questions the auto task force must answer is figuring out a sustainable number of annual auto sales. Only then can it determine the best way forward for U.S. automakers. “You had a huge number of cars being sold,” Rattner said, “so I don’t think it is prudent to assume the sale levels are going to back to those levels.”

Washington Post