Has the recession has arrived...

Landrover and Aston martin are now both rumoured to have dropped down to a 4 day week and BMW are closing plant oxford for 4 weeks instead of 2 over christmas. All this is due to lack of demand. Not good!

Nick

get out your wallets and go buy some stuff!

I agree with Benzboy to a larger extent. Hurts if you are one of the people who has been laid off or will be shortly laid off. If unemployment does continue up (was talk of hitting 3 million again by next summer!) then nobody will be buying cars new, used or otherwise... A mate of mine works at Toyota and they cut overtime ages ago which is making it very difficult for him to ballance his budget.

My concern is that if the recession is long and deep that "luxury items" like retro cars (as 2nd, 3rd cars whatever) will be millstones round their owners necks and will be sold off cheap or scrapped to appease wives and parents whatever. "We can't afford to pay the mortgage you certainly can't afford to do up that Ford Capri now, get it sold"

I can certainly predict that the bubble may well be about to burst on a lot of the scene taxed cars as disposable incomes shrink...

give it 12 months you may be able to pick up affordable Mk1 Escorts again.

I remember back in the early 90s Mk2 Jags were all like £50K cars, E Types were £90K, even Morris Minor saloons could get £3500 easily, then the recession struck and within no time £7500 bought you a good Mk2 Jag, £15K for a E type and £1500 for a Minor, top end. Strangely a lot of classic cars on high end agreed value policies caught fire about that time...

just what i thought , i give you 270 for it

agree with the above, but untill the chaffing media stops drowning us in pity, and the goverment takes them by the scruff of the neck and tells them start putting a positive spin on it all no one will put their hands in their pockets. Everyday we come home from uncertainty at work to more curse word on the box.

And there's me with a load of metal I was going to scrap back in the summer and never got round to it.....

No point now.

cars have been dropping about £10 a day for the last 2/3 weeks.
catalytic convertors have dropped like lead balloons and copper is down from four grand (!) a tonne to £1200 yesterday. might stop the halfwits coming round at work and theiving odd bits for drink moiney that gives us large headaches. someone broke in to the shed last year and took ONE 993 turbo alloy wheel from the set that layed there. who takes one? for £6 in ally and it ruins our set; cheers
unfortunatly it makes our job of buying cars for dismantling worse as the shells are now worth sod all.
there's flipsides everywhere you look.

Thing is, I'm looking at luxobarges like W124s and LS400s.
You can now get a good LS400 with long MOT and full service history for Sub £2k-3k for a 10 year old car. But this is a £50k new 10 year old car, not an old banger. This is the kind of car that in the last 2 or 3 years would still be £10-15k and being snapped to save as classics.

With petrol coming down, I'm tempted again by one.

You're both quite right, though the Toyota problem has something to do with Auris sales being curse word.
If I may provide some info from the world of car production, as we had a briefing around 2am this morning.

All the major players are looking at severely reduced profits, due to a really sudden downturn in sales. Nobody in the industry saw this coming, as it's only taken effect in the last two months.

Put yourself in the shoes of a manufacturer, Nissan for example. Your customer is the franchised dealer. The dealer asks you for, say, 2,000 micras for, say, October. This figure is made up partly of solid, confirmed orders, and partly speculation on the part of the dealer. The dealers have all been taken by surprise because things were going fine up until last month. Now though, their forecourts are full and they're putting dramatically smaller orders in.

Back at the factory, they're running the line at about one micra/note every minute, around 410 a shift. But suddenly the orders are halved, and you need to drop prodution to about 270 a shift to match demand. What are you supposed to do? In Nissan's case they've halted production for 2 weeks on micra/note line. Line 1, making Qashqai, is unaffected as yet because there's still a waiting list in Germany, Spain and Italy, and an order bank of some 60,000 units.

Other companies aren't so luckily positioned. Every manufacturer has introduced some form of production cut, whether it's time off or dropping line speed. Vauxhall, BMW, Aston, Land Rover Halewood, Range Rover Solihull, Ford Southampton (where they make Transit), Honda Swindon, etc etc. NMISA, Nissan's Barcelona plant has cut 1,800 jobs on Pathfinder line, a third of the workforce.

GM are on track to lose $15 BILLION this financial year. Ford have cut another 40,000 jobs as part of their wider ongoing "right-sizing" activity. To give an idea of the scale of the slowdown, the sales forecast for the whole industry FY2009 has fallen by 360,000 units to just over 2million.

Sorry if that was off topic, or if I bored anyone, but this will affect used sales too, and it'll get worse before it gets better.