It came as no surprise to anyone that December car sales were awful.

Here are the numbers.

• GM                                     Down 23% for the year
• Ford                                   Down 21% for the year
• Chrysler                             Down 30% for the year
• Toyota                               Down 16% for the year
• Honda                               Down 8.2% for the year
• Daimler AG                       Down 1.5% for the year
• Volkswagen                      Down 3.2% for the year
• Subaru                               Up 1% for the year

Not much more need be said.

Coincidentally, or maybe not, Paul Ingrassia has a good article in the WSJ today about Toyota. He does a thorough job dissecting their current problems and how they intend to approach them. Pretty refreshing stuff after the Detroit follies of the past few weeks. One thing that caught my eye was his comment that estimates of excess global capacity in the car business run as high as 20 million vehicles. That amounts to the output of 80 assembly plants.

Now aren’t you glad that our government picked such a fine industry in which to invest?

more:here