The Big Three Still Build a Lot of Cars

Here’s a cool graphic from the New York Times that shows where and by whom cars and light trucks are built in the United States. But of equal if less vivid interest is a piece of data from the accompanying story.

According to the NYT, 8.5 million cars and trucks were assembled in the United States last year, “but only about five million of those were made by the automakers traditionally known as the Big Three.”

Only? That’s more than half the total U.S. vehicle production for 2008. If BMW, Toyota, Honda, Nissan, et al., are covering the remaining 3 million, then the U.S. market would be in serious trouble if either GM (GMGMQ) or Chrysler had gone completely out of business rather than into Chapter 11 restructuring. Because I seriously doubt all the foreign “transplant” carmakers would have been able to double their production overnight.

And remember, the actual size of the North American auto market has been distorted of late. It’s been reduced to around 9 million vehicles annually, and many observers expect it to rebound to much higher numbers. So the 8.5 million that the NYT mentions wouldn’t be enough to satisfy demand.

This gives you pause when you consider that a key aspect of the General Motors bankruptcy is about giving birth to a new company that will have lost plants and reduced the numbers of cars and trucks it builds every year. As I argued recently, a legacy of overcapacity may not be a real problem; instead, we may be confronted with a future of automaker undercapacity in the United States.