I’m impressed by how rapidly this response devolved into libertarian craziness.

Oh, good, growing inventory. Just what every company in the world wants.

None of this matters.  If you tell Wall Street something, and you miss that something, people get mad.  It doesn’t matter if that something is significantly better than that something was a year ago.  That’s two completely different things you are comparing.

I think the big negative was that they produced more cars than they could deliver, and by a significant amount at that. They’ve solved the production problem, but now have an even bigger distribution problem.

They “hit” 5000 Model 3s/week in 2Q18. Now they’re barely hitting that number for all their cars combined.

BMW and MB are pretty notorious for “selling” a ton of vehicles that actually get put into dealer demo fleets. So they then have to be sold as used

When they set targets, yes.

As someone who is in the car industry, allow me to say - yikes. This is terrifying.

or were loaners & demos? iSeeCars only screens out cars with less than 1k on the odo .. at least in the case of BMW, NJ dealer lots seems to have a lot of inventory for ‘used’ BMWs that were never actually sold to a private buyer.

Lots of dealer (service) loaners in this market.

Little anecdote about losing parts manufacturers.

Well the Monte/Beta/037/Delta all used the Fiat Lampredi Twin Cam. Now Lancia just didn’t plug and play, that’s not Lancia. They mounted it transversely for better weight distribution. They also tweaked it up (The Lampredi is known for it’s ability to be modified) by advancing timing among other things to get more…

The moment you realize that the 1971 Lancia 2000 Coupe was indeed the perfect car to do LSD with.

Ford have been cutting back in the UK for decades of course. Car production ceased in 2002, a gearbox plant was sold to Getrag, most of their components plants were hived off to Visteon and later closed, the truck business was sold to Iveco and van production ceased in the last few years. They’re now reduced to engine…

106 hp used to be hot hatch territory, when I was a kiddo.

What’s that out there, in the fog and gloom? What are those four points of hopeful golden light? Are we saved from this murky miasma? Yes! Yes! It’s a 1980 AMC Eagle! We’re gonna be okay! All hail the AMC Eagle!

Right?
I remember driving a car with 40hp(actually the one in my Sig picture)

This

The sedan weighs 2385 pounds....

The two not so hot companies are the F and C part of FCA. PSA is doing fine. They bought Opel/Vauxhall from GM in 2017, and they turned a brand that turned a loss for decades into a profitable brand. In slightly over a year. To be fair, the initial loss was mostly due to corporate GM mismanagement, but still.