Article URL: https://www.wardsauto.com/news/the-auto-industry-is-building-for-a-past-thats-never-coming-back/825594/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49178317 Poi…

Too many car companies are operating without regard for a steadily declining customer base. Editor’s note: John McElroy is the president of BlueSky Productions, which produces Autoline Daily, and a longtime opinion columnist for WardsAuto. Views expressed here are his own. Take a look around the American automotive landscape, and you’ll see an industry acting as if new-car sales will grow forever. Before the decade is out, seven brand-new assembly plants are scheduled to come online in the United States alone. Cumulatively, all the big bets Toyota, Ford, Hyundai, Scout, Slate, VinFast, Lucid and Rivian are making on new assembly plants may be tooled to potentially make 1.8 million more cars and trucks. On paper, the logic seems sound: build localized capacity to offset imports, secure domestic supply chains, and prepare for a new era of propulsion. But if you lift up the hood and look at the actual data, you have to ask yourself a very uncomfortable question: Who is going to buy all these cars? According to the latest data from the Federal Reserve, existing automotive assembly plants in the U.S. are currently running at less than 70% of capacity. That means we already have nearly 4 million units of manufacturing capacity sitting entirely idle, gathering dust. And yet, we’re about to aggressively add more supply to a market that is already struggling with excess capacity. This capital expenditure spree is being driven by ten-year product cycles and five-year corporate strategies. But the auto industry is failing to look 20 years out, where a convergence of demographic shifts and alternative mobility trends is about to fundamentally change the concept of vehicle ownership. Look at the tech. Robotaxis are no longer a sci-fi experiment; they are actively picking up passengers in cities across the country. Autonomous "robocars" will transition from commercial fleets to consumer showrooms before this decade is out, according to Mercedes, Tesla and Lucid. Because a single autonomous vehicle operating in a shared fleet can replace multiple privately owned cars, the widespread adoption of this technology can’t help but reduce new-car sales volumes.