AUTO MANUFACTURERS WORLDWIDE GRAPPLE WITH THE CONCEPT OF ‘PEAK CAR’
December 1st, 2012
BY MARK ROWE
For decades the car industry in the developed world has expanded remorselessly. But a recent flurry of academic papers has come to the conclusion that the West (and other rich countries such as Japan and Australia) may have hit a plateau known as 'peak car'.
This concept argues that the number of people in the West who will ever buy a car has reached saturation point. Since car ownership became ubiquitous in the developed world during the 1950s, every subsequent generation has added to the volume of cars on the road. Now that that first generation ...
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