This was in today's Windsor Star.
http://www.windsorstar.com/business/Windsor+Chris+Vander+Doelen+Auto+numbers+bleak/2324029/story.htmlTwo stunning reports about the state of Canada's automotive industry came out this week. Together they describe the cause and effect of the tragedy that has befallen what was once the gem of Ontario's economy.
First, the job losses. The auto industry as a whole has lost more than 74,000 jobs since 2000, most of them in the last 18 months, according to DesRosiers Automotive Consultants, Inc.
To put the number of job losses in perspective, the entire Windsor census area had 59,230 family households in 2006, according to Statistics Canada. Imagine every household in the region losing a good job -- plus 15,000 more gone elsewhere.
You wouldn't know it by the news coverage, but only 27 per cent of the total job carnage was in assembly jobs. The rest were jobs in parts plants, which made up 54 per cent of the jobs lost, plus tool and die jobs, mouldmaking jobs and work in dealerships.
The parts sector took the worst drubbing: Nearly 40,000 jobs are gone -- we're now 40 per cent off the peak of 100,000 jobs a decade ago. A shocking 18,000 of those jobs disappeared this year alone.
Assembly jobs -- nearly all of them at Chrysler, General Motors, Ford and their partners -- are down by more than 20,000, a third of those jobs disappearing in 2009. The plunge in that category hasn't even finished yet, since GM's Windsor Transmission and some Windsor Ford facilities have yet to close.
The MTDM sector (machine, tool and die and mouldmaking), often the overlooked sister in the auto industry, has given up 10,000 jobs since the peak, 60 per cent of them this year alone. Most of those jobs were probably in Essex County.
And finally, automotive dealerships have lost 4,000 jobs from coast to coast, although you have to suspect those figures could continue to rise, too. They would all have been jobs in Detroit Three dealerships, of course.
The other shoe to drop was sales, and the figures unearthed by DesRosiers & Co., the only company which tracks these things in Canada, illustrate exactly why the manufacturing jobs disappeared as though blown away in a hurricane.
DesRosiers argues, correctly in my view, that you have to strip fleet sales out of the total sales figures to gain a clear view of how each automaker is faring in the marketplace.Fleet sales -- to daily rental companies, governments and large companies which order minivans by the thousands -- skew the figures so badly they obscure how each competitor is trending.
"Nowhere is the demise of the Detroit 3 shown more clearly than in the sales of passenger cars to consumers," DesRosiers told his clients in a note this week.
Coupled with the job losses of 2009, the latest retail auto sales figures are devastating. Did you know GM has lost 50 per cent of its combined car and truck retail sales since 1990 -- 42 per cent of its car sales in the last year alone? Or that it now ranks third in Canada in sales of passenger cars to consumers, behind Toyota and Honda?
Members of the Ford family also like to think of themselves as a more dominant part of the Canadian automotive landscape than they really are, coast to coast.
Take out the fleet sales and the farmers buying pickup trucks, and Ford sells fewer cars to consumers in Canada's major urban centres than Hyundai, (fourth), Mazda (fifth), Nissan (sixth) or Kia (seventh). Ford ranks eighth.
Chrysler is a miserable 11th -- behind BMW and Volkswagen, although you could argue that minivans should be included in passenger car sales, rather than light trucks, since they are family haulers.
In 1990, the Detroit Three carmakers held 58.6 per cent of the retail passenger car market in Canada. By the end of October 2009, that share had fallen to a mere 20.3 per cent, a "stunning ... incredible" collapse, in DesRosier's words.
Only one in five passenger cars sold in Canada now comes from Detroit.
Some might question what is to be gained by picking at these scabs. But you can't plot your future unless you understand your past.
And while there no doubt were a hundred contributing factors to the demise of the Detroit automakers, in the end it just boils down to sales and consumer choice.
Detroit ceded control of the domestic retail passenger car market to the imports years ago,
but kept lying to itself for a decade with the truck fad and cannibalistic fleet sales.
Ontario, and Windsor in particular, bet its industrial future on three horses pumped full of sales steroids that made them appear stronger than they really were.
