Suddenly, it’s on the rise again: a photo of a massive lot of automobiles, accompanied by text that reads something like “Nobody is buying brand new cars anymore! Well they are, but not on the scale they once were. Millions of brand new unsold cars are just sitting redundant on runways and car parks around the world. There, they stay, slowly deteriorating without being maintained. Below is an image of a massive car park at Swindon, United Kingdom, with thousands upon thousands of unsold cars just sitting there with not a buyer in sight.”
Only that image has been floating around the internet since at least 2009. Yet it suddenly rose to the top of Reddit again last week, for some unknown reason, despite the fact that Snopes.com has debunked the image at least five times since it first appeared in January 2009.
The images, of course, came from the very moment that the Great Recession was in full swing, and new car inventories increased significantly. But, as Snopes.com notes: “It’s not 2009 anymore. Although these pictures captured some large overstocks of new cars that were produced just before a huge unanticipated drop in demand, that was a temporary phenomenon from several years ago. British automobile production, for example, has since rebounded to hit a record high in 2013 (with a car being produced every 20 seconds that year) because UK car sales also reached their highest level in the past several years in 2013, with consumers purchasing a total of 2.26 million vehicles.”
Numbers are up in the United States as well, with 15 million cars sold here in 2013, a number that hadn’t been surpassed since pre-recession 2007.
A little geography lesson to put this inter further context: That photo comes from Sheerness in the UK. Sheerness sits on a point where the River Thames and the River Medway meet and empty out into the English Channel. It is the single point of entry for just about every European car sold in the United Kingdom. When you produce and buy a lot of, you eventually need to park them somewhere. Those inventories expand and contract constantly.
For example, take a look at this Google Maps satellite image of just one place where a lot of cars move around: Southern Auto Auctions in East Windsor, Connecticut. Every single Wednesday, 2500-plus dealers show up here to buy and sell used cars. More than 4,000 cars move through 12 lanes that day, and there’s storage for tens of thousands of vehicles on this lot. Sometimes it’s full. Sometimes it’s not.
Similarly, take a look at the Google Satellite view of the GM Truck plant in Arlington, Texas. Given the number of empty spaces in that parking lot, we’d say it’s time to ramp up production, right? But automotive production on such a massive scale is something you can’t understand with just a single photo.
There’s also a great video on YouTube of the Peel Port in Liverpool — four hours to the east of the massive automotive importing port of Sheerness where the image originally came from — that shows what goes on day and night at a port.
In two and a half minutes, you see ships coming and going constantly, but the huge piles of containers hardly ever change.
Let’s just all agree to do a quick search on Snopes.com before we predict the end of the world, shall we?
Four hours east of Sheerness you’d be near Amsterdam, not Liverpool
which is 200 miles to the northwest. You’d also be wet. It’s mostly sea.