Friday, April 06, 2018

Here is an aerial of that Tesla lot I was talking about a few days ago.



The drone is over it 1 minute 20 in. I'm not sure why they would need to store this many cars. How many do you guesstimate are in there?

There is another lot in this vid that comes into focus at 1 minute 42 that I can't tell if those are new cars or employee cars. This lot is not visible from the street. I will have to see if I can find a different vantage point. Maybe on the backside. Employees usually park in a different area. But they ~are~ overflowing right now. Plus there are some yellow cars in there and I've yet to see a yellow Tesla.

I wanted to talk about this lot before the recalled cars started coming in. I thought I had blogged about this site the first time I saw it, but I can't find a post. I'm going to have to track down my images to see how much it's grown.

6 comments:

  1. Capital of Texas RefugeeFriday, April 06, 2018 9:07:00 PM

    I've been saving this bit of Carpocalypse(tm) fun for you ...

    Avonmouth, Bristol, United Kingdom

    Make sure the map is switched into satellite mode.

    Go ahead, click anywhere there's a parking lot, it'll be fun for you. :-)

    If you can guess what the significance is of this particular area, you might gain a further appreciation of the car supply chain problem, but here's a hint: I have not seen this volume go down by more than half in the past five years.

    On the north side of the river, there's a Copart auto salvage yard, just to give you an idea of how massive this operation really is.

    Now move your satellite map to the northeast up to junction 17 of the M5.

    To the east is the largest shopping mall in the South West of England, and what do you see on the east side of the shopping mall that might remind you of what's around the first area (which is called Royal Portbury Docks, BTW)?

    Yeah, they're often out of space even in a facility that large, so they're using a mall parking area as overflow just like in the US. The fact that it's on the back side and not easily accessible, just like that Tesla lot, was what reminded me of that area as well.

    350k recalled VWs outside Victorville? That's temporary.

    This is not the area that an old Zero Hedge article mentioned, although this also is (just barely) in Gloucestershire -- this is something entirely different, and it's been like this for years ...

    Well, OK, not quite: the area around the port expands by increments of roughly ten thousand parking spaces at a time.

    There's a really cool museum on the northeast end of what used to be RAF Filton, near that big shopping mall (Cribbs Causeway) -- they have the last Concorde that ever flew in there.

    Also, there's a really nice McLaren dealership nearby, which is next to the Aston Martin dealership. :-)

    BTW, it's becoming harder for me to leave comments -- when I improved browser fingerprinting security lately, now Google's captcha tends to keep me out of Blogger and most Cloudflare sites. That escalated rather quickly.

    Enjoy! :-)

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  2. I never have word verification turned on. Or captcha. I've gone through my setting and I guess I don't get a say in this. I have it set for no word verification. I'm trying to figure out how we can get around this because I know that truly sucks having to keep using those things. I'm not sure what to do though.

    About the cars. What the holy hell!? That is current? How long can crap like this go on. I just don't get it. How are companies not failing with all this inventory.

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  3. Capital of Texas RefugeeFriday, April 06, 2018 11:39:00 PM

    That's current and has been ongoing for at least five years that I know of.

    The hint then: that inventory is also outgoing, not just sitting there -- it does cycle through that port in Bristol. The bottleneck involves getting those vehicles on ships.

    There wouldn't be bottlenecks like this if margins on vehicles were higher, so the vehicles are being shipped in the most cost-effective way possible, which is as mass consignments on very large container ships where the cost per unit is considerably lower.

    And so it's cheaper to maintain vehicles in Carpocalypse(tm) lots with plenty of relatively cheap bottlenecks that scale well financially than it is to focus on supply-side ERP improvements where the companies might be at greater risk to eat more costs.

    The relatively close juxtaposition of a large Copart yard on the other side of the River Avon suggests an ultimate resting place for a small amount of unsold inventory: those vehicles are taken down, sold as wholesale parts, and the losses help the companies involved avoid higher taxes. There are a few other vehicle tear-down companies on that side of the river, but Copart stood out because they're well known here in the US.

    The manufacturers also don't need certificates for export, duties, emissions, and so forth as well for the vehicles that disappear up the Copart tailpipe.

    There's a smaller version of this thing going on in Houston as well, but it's easier to clear the inventory through the used car auction lots in the area.

    Your earlier pictures now suggest that it's cheaper to fart around getting vehicles off car haulers/stackers, which may imply that there are fewer vehicles to deal with right now in that particular area.

    It would not surprise me if some of these companies have evolved their own better versions of ERP to take into account cost improvements that can be achieved simply by doing less and by doing it much slower.

    Anyway, about captcha: I don't think it's something you can choose because it's a mandatory requirement of Gooblogger. I narrowed down some of what was interfering to two specific uBlock Origin annoyance block lists that were trying to be a bit overzealous about cookie blocking, and so this might yet get better.

    So I'll just have to see if this continues to work ...

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  4. That is just the craziest thing ever. It's like the laws of supply and demand don't exist. Crap like that usually only happens in socialist nations. But I guess we are all socialists now. Car companies are too big to fail...

    Keeping my fingers crossed with the captcha success.

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  5. Man...that is terrifying. But I do like the term class ten shitstorm. I think those hurricanes delayed the pain, but it's still coming. No one knows when... but that can not go on forever.

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  6. Capital of Texas RefugeeSunday, April 15, 2018 7:06:00 PM

    I came back to look through comments, and when I saw "class ten shitstorm", I was reminded of one of my favorite sailing books ...

    "Fastnet, Force 10: The Deadliest Storm in the History of Modern Sailing" by John Rousmaniere

    This comes from a guy who used to make instructional videos about heavy weather sailing where he'd casually say that there would be a short break while he went off in search of really nasty weather just as an example.

    ReplyDelete