分析师警告美国汽车业面临结构性需求悬崖

In 2026. The auto industry in the US is expected to sell about a million and a half fewer units than it did when the industry hit record sales about a decade ago, according to some. This isn't a temporary slump. It's the beginning of a structural decline. Annual US car sales could fall to 13.7 million units by 2040. Demographics, technology and changing behavior all point to a permanent shift. It is the perfect storm, isn't it?

It starts with population declines. You're no longer a growth industry. You're a declining industry at a time when the technology is disrupting everything. There are a few factors that. Together could result in about 2 million fewer U.S. new car sales by 2040. First population US population growth has slowed and at this point depends entirely on immigration. If immigration policies tighten, the auto market is bound to stagnate or shrink.

Second, consumer behavior about half of 16 year olds are not even getting driver's licenses. When I was 16, everybody was waiting for the day their birthday came around to run down to the DMV and get their license. That is definitely a factor and a trend that is that is impacting this. By age 25, most people do have a license, but they're confronted with vehicle prices that are too high, which keep them out of the car market.

For Sam Fiorani of Autoforecast Solutions, the primary threat to vehicle volumes is price. We're still seeing groups of young people who enjoy driving and want a new car, but fewer or fewer can afford it. You need the younger people, the the less wealthy people of us, to start buying new vehicles. Third, technology auto industry forecaster Mark Gottfredson said that if autonomous vehicle tech improves enough to become mainstream, the share of the population with driver's licenses could drop by about 2 to 3% by 2040.

Autonomous vehicles could also stand to reduce the number of cars per driver. Historically, that has been about 1.2. We expect that, you know, in the next ten years or so to drop to about 1.1 vehicles per driver. Perhaps the most direct indicator is not the rate at which people buy cars. It's the rate at which they get rid of them. This is the one that people don't think about, but is actually the biggest factor in the number of new vehicles that are sold.

In 2000, about 6% of all cars were deregistered in any given year. That's basically a vehicle that's no longer getting registered because it's getting scrapped or sent out of the country. And those cars needed to be replaced with new ones sooner or later. By early 2026, that fell to about 5%. Gottfredson estimates it could drop to 4.4 by 2040. Old cars are lasting longer, a record 12.8 years on the road in 2025. New cars are safer and more sophisticated, but that technology carries a price.

Collision avoidance, Adas systems, all kinds of new technologies that weren't even dreamt of 15 years ago are now becoming standard on everything. So we're going to see those vehicles continue to be more expensive and more and more people trying to find ways to keep their car on the road longer. As with all forecasts, things could change and EV tech breakthrough could spur a boom in vehicle sales. The US could dramatically liberalize its immigration policy.

Robo taxis could be a long way off. Gottfredson's research does include a base case of about 15.7 million new car sales in 2040, which is slightly below S&P Global Mobility and Cox Automotive forecasts for 2026. This case assumes licensing rates remain stable. Immigration stays at about 900 000 people per year. Population growth is about 0.3 to 0.4% year over year, and there's about 1.2 cars per person. Up until recently, Gottfredson expected this structural demand decline to hit as soon as 2030, but the rollout of new technology, especially self-driving cars, is taking longer than many in the industry had forecast.

I think our perspective on autonomy and sort of vehicle shedding has probably gone a little bit slower than we had anticipated. And so it may be a little bit later that we get there. We've been listening to companies tell us that they're going to have autonomous vehicles in five years, for 15 years now. But the birth rate variable is locked in. We already know how many people have been born and how many people will be of vehicle driving age at age 16 in 16 years from now.

And so we can say with quite a bit of certainty that when we get to 2040, we're going to see some decline in the U.S. that decline is even worse in places like Europe and in places like most of the countries in Asia. Now. At the global level, there are some caveats. First, many markets, most notably China, that might be poised for a population drop still have relatively low vehicle penetration, but populations and dozens of countries are already shrinking and global growth is slowing faster than expected.

If immigration continues to boost the US population, it will be an increasingly important market for global automakers trying to compensate for stagnation and decline in other parts of the world. The competition in the US is going to be ferocious, and I think that there's too many automakers and too many brands competing for the consumers. Autoforecast solutions is expecting annual US volumes to stagnate through 2033, the furthest year in the future for which the company makes forecasts.

The market is is right sized, and new players are just going to make that tighter and tighter. We're going to see Chinese manufacturers coming into the to the US market eventually. And when that happens it's going to put the squeeze.