Ceiling Zero

Sales of new cars, used cars and jalopies all hit bottom again last week. All over the U.S. the story was the same: gas rationing and the tire shortage have made cars a drug on the market. Only active buyers are the steelmakers; last month they swarmed through junkyards, snapped up 400,000 old cars at prices ranging from $14 to $22 per ton.

When WPB blacked out the auto industry after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. had only about 500,000 new cars on hand, a two-month peacetime supply. This looked like the tightest shortage of all, so OPA stopped all sales for January and February, allowed only 40,000 cars for each of the next three months. But last week OPA released the April sales figures and proved an astounding fact: even if new cars were twice as hard to get, there would be no serious shortage except, of all places, in Detroit, where new-rich defense workers boosted sales over the allowance. The country over, only 17,000 new cars were sold in March, only 29,600 in April--and that was before gas-rationing talk knocked the spots out of the market.

Used-car sales are just as bad--maybe worse. Prices are 25% to 33% below last year. At a New York City Police Department "lost-strayed-or-stolen" auction, 1,500 bidders bypassed 155 second-hand cars (except as junk), bid up to $37 for second-hand bicycles. In the Carolinas, new and used-car sales were off 50%; in Florida, many a disgusted dealer got ready to quit; in Maine, there were more sellers than buyers. Even in the gasoline-rich West and Midwest, rumors of rationing slowed sales down.

All this is costing the 40,000 U.S. auto dealers a pretty penny. Maryland dealers last week figured that it cost them $450,000 a month to store and service 30,000 new cars frozen in the Government stockpile. Although OPA allows a dealer 1% a month service charge (average: $10), he collects only when he sells the car--if he can get it from the buyer. The best any about-to-go-broke dealer could hope for this week was that the RFC would bail him out and take all new cars off his hands.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.