Word: auto
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Last week frightened steelmen could not help recalling the story of a week last autumn. When steelmen returned jauntily from 1938 Labor Day weekends, they were confident that no more dreary months of 25% and 30% operations lay ahead-October would start the 1939 auto model year off with a bang. Soon all steel-peddling haunts buzzed with reports that auto production schedules called for 1,000.000 1939 cars by year's end. At a ton of steel per car, Detroit would have to buy 1,000,000 tons. Buick had just bought 35,000 tons. Ford was shopping...
...instead of $56.27 a ton and they had enough orders for five months of operations at 50% of capacity. Their week of war had sold not just 1,000,000 tons to feed Detroit from October through Christmas, but something like 2,000,000 tons-enough to tide auto production over until the 1939 model year was nearly over. Result: the 1939 model cars were about $25 cheaper than the 1938, and $10 of that cut was put up by the steelmen...
...last October,-price cutting spread. Some steel prices dropped as much as $11 a ton or up to 20%. Characteristically, competing automen disputed Ford's claim for credit in securing the reduction. Meanwhile, large steel orders by the motormakers are probably two months off, for the auto companies have enough steel on hand to last until large scale production begins on 1940 models and want to be sure their big buying is done at the bottom, not on the way down. Aggressive National Steel Co., always up front among the price cutters, admitted that it didn't "know...
...Shanghai, Japanese Inventor Akishige Matsumoto, in a patriotic fervor because of Japan's war shortage of gasoline, announced he had invented a "vegetarian auto which . . . grazes on fruits and vegetables...
...Although next autumn's annual Auto Show-has already been moved forward a month, to October, to motor makers all-summer shut downs seem unavoidable and they are tempted to beat the gun on each other by putting 1940 models on the streets as early as July. This would not be good news to industry's toolmakers, for such premature previews would pay dividends to manufacturers who spent least time (and money) on getting new machinery for the new models...