Showing posts with label cars. Show all posts
May 8, 2017
Makeover Monday: Which cars do the Dutch prefer?
automobile
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cars
,
Dutch
,
heat map
,
infographic
,
Makeover Monday
,
Netherlands
,
purchase frequency
,
purchasing
,
time series
,
trends
4 comments
The viz to makeover this week is merely a table:
What works?
- The table is ranked starting with the best seller.
- Including only the top 10 gives the table focus.
- Title gives us the overall summary for context.
What could be improved?
- Include a more impactful title
- How does this compare to prior years?
- The table makes me do math in my head to compare the top cars.
- Simply by making the table a bar chart it would become more engaging.
- Some of the models are missing the brand.
The data set is actually pretty extensive: 9.2 million car purchases covering 1952-2017. For my viz, I'm going to focus from 1970-2017. I chose to start with 1970 because that looks like the start of purchases every month.
Before I start my exploration, here are the things I'm interested in learning (to help me focus my analysis):
- How are purchases changing over time?
- What car brand do people prefer? Has that changed?
- How has the price per car changed over time?
- What's the most popular color?
- If I were moving to the Netherlands and needed to buy a car, what should I buy?
- When is the best time to buy a car? Conversely, when is the most expensive time?
Next, I did a bit of Googling for inspiration. Over and over again, infographics about the best time to purchase a car came up. This one in particular caught my attention for the colors and the layout:
I used Coolors.co to upload the images and pick off the colors. I then added these to my preference file. I created a regular color palette that included the green and a sequential palette for the more brown colors. Overall, I want to mimic this layout, replacing the text with charts as much as I can.
Lastly, I really like the storytelling and design of Pooja Gandhi's week 16 viz, so I wanted to emulate parts of that and also use this an exercise to see how long it may have taken her. HINT: It took me hours to float everything and get it just right. It sure would be easier if there was a grid to snap everything into.
Another fun week, one in which I feel like I learned a lot about design. With that, here's my week 19 visualisation about car purchasing in The Netherlands. Click on the image for the interactive version.
October 8, 2009
Auto Sales & Unemployment
cars
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cashforclunkers
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danmurray
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facebook
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FRED
,
government
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iraq
,
politics
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presidentbush
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tomprice
,
unemployment
,
wallstreetjournal
,
war
,
WSJ
3 comments
Before you judge my political views, let me first say that I think ALL politicians are frauds and that few of them represent anyone except the special interest groups that support their campaigns.
I received the following message from Congressman Tom Price on Monday (10/5/09): "Last week we received more bad news in the job market. 263,000 jobs were lost during the month of September and the unemployment rate is now at 9.8%. The verdict is in and the economic policies of President Obama and Democrats in Congress have become a massive failure."
I understand Congressman Price's position, but it bothers me that he has taken the lead of talk show hosts to use scare tactics to spread his message. I would, for once, like to hear his opinion. His entire rant can be found here.
In addition, my friend Dan Murray posted a link to a Wall Street Journal article on his Facebook page that essentially said the "Cash For Clunkers" program failed.
I wanted to see if I could draw any sort of correlation, or at least possibly provide the specific details.
Here is my visualization:
First, to Congressman Price's accusations. The rise in unemployment started around January 2007. Obviously President Obama was not yet in office. So what happened that could have sparked the sudden rise? This is precisely when President Bush announced the surge in troops for the Iraq War during his State of the Union address. I can't say that was the exact cause, but I do find the timing neatly coincidental.
Now, onto the WSJ's claims that Cash for Clunkers failed to help the economy. Yes, there was a huge decline in new car sales in September, but this is not unprecedented if you look at historical sales.
Back in October 2001, the "0% interest" programs were introduced by the Big 3. This program was a HUGE boost to sales (35% over prior month), but it resulted in a decline of 18% in November and 25% over the following two months.
The Big 3 introduced the "Employee Pricing" programs in July 2005. This program was another HUGE "success" (sales increased 15% over prior month and 22% over May), but it resulted in a decline of 18% in August, 20% through September, and 28% through October.
The Cash For Clunkers program (August 2009), resulted in a 4.4M units increase in sales over June or 45%. That increase has never been approached in the last 10 years. The results, however, was a decreased in sales in September of 4.9M units or 35%. If this program follows the behavior of the previous two, we should see a decrease of an additional ~7% over the next 1-2 months at which time sales should stabilize.
Now, I want to take a leap to connect the two (auto sales and unemployment). A significant number of people were employed by the Big 3, so when auto sales take a nose dive, you would have to expect that they would begin laying off workers, which would ultimately have a direct impact on the national unemployment rate.
Back to President Bush. I cannot directly correlate his Address to these figures, but the timing sure is suspect.
* All data courtesy of FRED.
I received the following message from Congressman Tom Price on Monday (10/5/09): "Last week we received more bad news in the job market. 263,000 jobs were lost during the month of September and the unemployment rate is now at 9.8%. The verdict is in and the economic policies of President Obama and Democrats in Congress have become a massive failure."
I understand Congressman Price's position, but it bothers me that he has taken the lead of talk show hosts to use scare tactics to spread his message. I would, for once, like to hear his opinion. His entire rant can be found here.
In addition, my friend Dan Murray posted a link to a Wall Street Journal article on his Facebook page that essentially said the "Cash For Clunkers" program failed.
I wanted to see if I could draw any sort of correlation, or at least possibly provide the specific details.
Here is my visualization:
First, to Congressman Price's accusations. The rise in unemployment started around January 2007. Obviously President Obama was not yet in office. So what happened that could have sparked the sudden rise? This is precisely when President Bush announced the surge in troops for the Iraq War during his State of the Union address. I can't say that was the exact cause, but I do find the timing neatly coincidental.
Now, onto the WSJ's claims that Cash for Clunkers failed to help the economy. Yes, there was a huge decline in new car sales in September, but this is not unprecedented if you look at historical sales.
Back in October 2001, the "0% interest" programs were introduced by the Big 3. This program was a HUGE boost to sales (35% over prior month), but it resulted in a decline of 18% in November and 25% over the following two months.
The Big 3 introduced the "Employee Pricing" programs in July 2005. This program was another HUGE "success" (sales increased 15% over prior month and 22% over May), but it resulted in a decline of 18% in August, 20% through September, and 28% through October.
The Cash For Clunkers program (August 2009), resulted in a 4.4M units increase in sales over June or 45%. That increase has never been approached in the last 10 years. The results, however, was a decreased in sales in September of 4.9M units or 35%. If this program follows the behavior of the previous two, we should see a decrease of an additional ~7% over the next 1-2 months at which time sales should stabilize.
My take: the auto industry waited too long to offer another teaser program.
Now, I want to take a leap to connect the two (auto sales and unemployment). A significant number of people were employed by the Big 3, so when auto sales take a nose dive, you would have to expect that they would begin laying off workers, which would ultimately have a direct impact on the national unemployment rate.
Back to President Bush. I cannot directly correlate his Address to these figures, but the timing sure is suspect.
* All data courtesy of FRED.
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