Projo Cars Blog

I would be the last to predict that the recession will be short lived. I was the mug, after all, who bought a house in Dallas in 1987 just before the market crashed.

I was reassigned back to New York two years later and kept it rented for five years until I managed to sell it for the value of the mortgage. Profit? You must be joking! Total loss and total nightmare.

So that experience should convince me that while U.S. auto sales may have hit bottom - they fell 37 percent in January compared with last year and hit a 28-year low - it will be some time before they go back up.

But I confess that I am the first to hope that the downturn will be short lived and to look for reasons that it might be.

2008 is not 1987. The world is smaller, we know more and history adjusts itself faster than ever before. The information revolution leaves no one in the dark and with knowledge we are able to adapt faster to each Brave New World.

And we are by no means alone. The international community, including such power houses as China, is on board with bailout programs and economic stimulus packages that reflect a concerted effort to make this short lived.

For a year or so, I worked in an office building in Greenwich, Conn., that overlooked I-95. And I would occasionally watch the traffic thundering by and wonder where this or that big truck was going, what local round was this pickup on or where that big sedan was headed around lunchtime.

It was mesmerizing because it was so relentless, the wheels of commerce and industry literally rolling by and reflecting in their energy the dynamic quality of the nation's economy.

My father, an officer with the Royal Navy who visited the Brooklyn Navy Yards during WWII, always said the two aspects of New York that impressed him most were the elegance of the women in Manhattan and the industry of the stevedores in the shipyard.

He said he had never seen men work so hard.

The wheels of commerce and industry are still rolling and while many of us are struggling to bring our lives together in face of declining assets, layoffs and foreclosures, we will work ourselves through this as we always have.

And if there was ever a time to get a new set of wheels rolling in the form of a new or pre-owned car or truck, this is it with dealers offering great incentives to move the metal off the lot.

- Peter C.T. Elsworth

 Tags  auto sales Commentary hope recession

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