Slowdown Time

The first 60 days of auto sales, according to Ford's Group President Lee lacocca, establish the pattern of any model-year. Last week, as that milepost passed, Detroit was gearing down for a slow winter. Over the next three months, automakers plan to assemble 2,580,453 vehicles, 417,453 fewer than they made last December, January and February. Automakers blame most of the slowdown on the fact that the public simply is not in the mood to buy. This week Chrysler plans to shut down three of its seven assembly plants for a week and three more for a day, because its dealers are overstocked with 1970 cars.

Intermediate Year. Production has been cut back a bit by strikes. A five-week walkout at an American Motors Corp. plant in Kenosha, Wis., which was settled last week, cost A.M.C. more than 30,000 cars. Another strike at a Chevrolet plant in Flint, Mich., has reduced General Motors' production by 4,375 cars a week, for nine weeks so far. Ford's new Maverick is selling at the rate of 400,000 a year but is drawing sales from the company's other lines. Ford salesmen believe, however, that this will be the year not of the compact but of the intermediate-size car--the first year that sales of intermediates will equal or surpass those of standard-size automobiles.

One major supplier to the auto industry, Collins L. Carter, chairman of Hayes-Albion Corp., which makes castings and parts, has lowered his prediction of output from 8,700,000 vehicles to an even 8,000,000 for the 1970-model years. The auto companies themselves are officially holding to their forecasts, which are generally in line with G.M. President Edward Cole's estimate of 8,500,000 domestic cars. To reach that sales goal, automakers are counting on buyers returning to the showrooms next spring.

Selling on Sunday. The auto companies are not alone in their struggle against increasing consumer resistance. For the first nine months of this year, overall retail sales are only 4% above their 1968 pace--less than the rate of price increases. Even in Southern California, where department-store sales are generally up, one discount-store manager, Paul Hulse of Redondo Beach's Hartfield-Zodys, detects a downturn in sales of color televisions, luxury refrigerators and stoves. To meet the competition of discount stores, Sears, Roebuck has opened some 175 of its 825 stores for business on Sunday. Retailers--and automakers--can take heart from a historical pattern detected in a University of Michigan study. Over the past 25 years, consumers have resisted buying whenever prices have climbed sharply, even though their incomes were also increasing. Invariably, sales have later rebounded to coincide with the personal-income gains.

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