Kickstart: When a 50 percent sales drop is good news

The North American auto industry would like you to know that things could be worse.

Sales of passenger vehicles plunged about 50 percent in North America during April, but that compares to earlier estimates by J.D. Power that had expected up to an 80 percent drop.

And in fact, retail sales that had been down 60 percent during the last week of March, when shutdowns hit most of the U.S., managed to rebound to only 40 percent behind average for the last week of April compared to April 2019.

"The week ending April 26 marks four straight weeks of improving conditions," J.D. Power said in a report. "U.S. retail sales are now in recovery."

The concern now, according to a story in our sister publication Automotive News, is whether assembly plants and suppliers can ramp up again when demand grows from car buyers who were forced to wait out the market.

"Supply of pickup trucks in general is the one thing we're watching very closely because that's the metric right now that could really knock the sales out of this recovery," said Tyson Jominy, vice president of automotive consulting at J.D. Power.

Speaking of auto suppliers, as global companies prepare to reopen in North America, they're following steps taken by plants in China and Europe.

Grahame Burrow, president of Magna International Inc.'s Exteriors business, told Plastics News' Sarah Kominek that all of the company's plants in China are operating at about 80 percent of capacity.

"The automotive industry is back," he said, and will continue to reopen "from east to west. Many of our OEM customers in Europe are in the process of restarting now. We are in lock step with them as they hit their start dates and as they ramp up their production."

So far, Magna's production restarts in Europe and China "have been successful," he added.

When you think of research universities with their own injection molding machines, you may think Penn State Erie or Ferris State University or University of Akron.

But Harvard?

Yes, as Editor Don Loepp discovered when he talked to Richard Novak, senior staff engineering at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University, the Cambridge, Mass., college has two injection molding machines along with 3D printing equipment and in-house expertise that proved vital when Beth Israel Deaconness Medical Center came asking for help solving its shortages of medical swabs.

"It was an interesting project. Definitely far from what I typically do at Harvard," Novak said in a telephone interview with Plastics News.

The Wyss Institute's staff comes from Harvard's Schools of Medicine, Engineering, Arts & Sciences, Design and Education, and they have a close relationship with the medical center, so it was just the right group to quickly develop and test new swabs.

The story doesn't end in Boston. It also stretches out to Proto Labs Inc. in Minnesota, Innovative Product Brands Inc. of Highland, Calif., and a molding site in Guangdong, China.