Big Demand for Automobiles Expected at War's End

David J. Wilkie
St. Petersburg Times
7 September 1941

DETROIT—(The Times Special News Service) — Automobile manufacturers, cutting down their production of cars for the defense emergency period, foresee the piling up of the largest unsatisfied demand for their product ever known.

None of the nation's car makers has any idea how long the emergency will continue; all are convinced car production will be curtailed through 1943 and perhaps longer.

Every one of the car makers firmly believes the motorcar industry will have a vital part in the return to normal peacetime economy. It is with this thought in mind that they are more concerned right now with continuing automotive research in their laboratories than they are with the volume of cars to be produced during the 1942 and 1943 model periods.

The number of passenger cars that can be manufactured during those years will depend mainly upon the amount of raw materials that can be spared from the defense effort. Few, if any, among the car makers who believe that the combined total car output of the next 24 months will equal that of the model year just closed.

That view would be altered only, say sources in the confidence of the car manufacturers, by the sudden discovery that the nation's steel production capacity can be increased far more than is now indicated.

Throughout the past year those engineers who could be spared from the enormous defense job assigned to the motorcar manufacturers have sought to develop metals and other materials to replace those required for the machines of war. They were as successful as most of them hoped to be, but of course, they could not develop a substitute for steel; neither did they foresee a year ago the doubling and trebling of the defense orders initially placed with the motor industry.

In other words, the requirements of the armament program have proved to be far greater than the car manufacturers originally expected. They proceeded through most of the 1941 model period on the assumption that the original 20 per cent curtailment ordered in car output would hold through 1942. Now there is more than a little doubt in trade quarters that the total production for the year ahead will reach 2,500,000 vehicles. That would be less than 50 per cent of the 1941 model output.

If they make 2,500,000 vehicles during the next 12 months the volume will not be enough to replace cars sent to the scrap heap. In 1940 (the replacement demand totaled 2,600,000 cars; in the 10 years leading up to and including 1940 the average was 2,338,661 units.

The end of the present emergency, as the motorcar makers visualize it, will find them with enormous production facilities geared to manufacture the machinery of war in huge volume; it will also find raw material on hand in extraordinary abundance, they believe.

The car manufacturers believe this capacity, coupled with the big accumulated demand for cars, will have an important part in the nation's orderly return to a peacetime economy.