Morris Minor Owners Club

billions have been devalued anyway. I'm sure a billion used to be a million million. Now its only a thousand.....

I depends if your English or American...

leyther8008 wrote:An insider told me Vauhall sold 40 cars last month!! (Feb 09) and they have the capacity for producing 50 an hour.

Company wide more than that.... one factory in Germany was producing 9000 Ford Focus's per week at one point. The Focus is also produced in Belgium (and I think somewhere else), to jointly build nearly 1.3 million Ford Focus's per year...

At that point there were customers on the end of all of them..... in Europe too

The new car market has been down around 30-35% vs last year for the last few months. Much of the crisis seems to be media driven - e.g. every single month we get figures showing a decrease of retail sales, car sales, house prices, whatever - this is not news, we know these things are down, but every time the results are published it is treated as "new news" and it makes us all think twice before opening our wallets (apart from me, doing my bit by buying my first Minor ). In six months time the media will have nothing to report on as year-on-year figures will have levelled out (the decline in car sales already seems to have stabilised, we just keep being told about it every month) and we'll all start to feel a bit more confident. The banks will all have declared their hand with respect to bad debt and start chasing profit by lending again, and businesses will start to bounce back as quickly as they were hit by the downturn (assuming they were fundamentally sound in the first place). Unfortunately there will be a lot of pain in the meantime.

bpr81a wrote:billions have been devalued anyway. I'm sure a billion used to be a million million. Now its only a thousand.....

I was working on the million million principle but I honestly have no idea what it actually is

Just to put my previous rant into context, see the below link to a "news" story from none other than the Financial Times. The real story is "New car market market still down around a third, same as it has been for the last 6 months, nothing to see here folks". But that wouldn't be anywhere near negative enpugh, would it?

I'll take some more tablets...

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/6304f0f0-228c-1 ... utomobiles

I must admit it took nearly 2 weeks for me to even see a 09 reg vehicle (I drive over 1000 miles a month, in a quiet month )

I'm not at all surprised the figures are down, but I wonder as people realise they Can afford to buy a car when the D word slacks off, will alot not also realise that as their older car got over their self imposed 'Age to change' that it didn't automatically explode or disintergrate. As such would some not keep the car that little bit longer?

I do keep cars till they die (current runner is a '98 with 120K) so apart from dreaded rust (its a FORD) there is no reason that I can't keep it for a couple more years.

My change point is when the MOT repairs cost more than the value of the car.

I think these days - a 'billion' is considered to be 1000 Million. So really - approx £800 each. About the same as we each pay for the MPs 'expenses'!

ill keep running my 11 year old saab cant seewhy i should change a perfeclally good car

Exactly!

I'm going to need a replacement this summer as I don't think the fiesta is going to economically pass its MOT, so I will be looking for something older which will keep me going for a few years yet