Jeff Rubin, CIBC:

US auto sales, already at a 34-year low, will likely drop another 30 to 40 percent and may never recover to previous levels.

Roughly half of the 51 light vehicle plants in the US will be permanently closed in the coming years.

There will be 25 million fewer cars on the road in the US in the next five years.

Louis Menand:

The interstates changed the phenomenology of driving.

Verlyn Klinkenborg:

Someone from the future, I’m sure, will marvel at our blindness and at the hole we have driven ourselves into.

Recently:

A survey last year by the business daily Nikkei found that only 25 percent of Japanese men in their 20s wanted a car, down from 48 percent in 2000, contributing to the slump in sales.