New car sales

It is a curious fact, and one that will probably not surprise anyone who has spent more than five minutes observing the patterns humans insist on finding in data, that as fewer people bought new cars between 2007 and 2016, fewer people also owned BlackBerrys. One had wheels and an engine. The other was a phone shaped like a small, depressing rectangle. They moved together as if choreographed by some invisible hand that had never heard of causation.

What probably happened is that both variables were drowning in the same economic current. The 2008 financial crisis didn't just make people cautious about new cars—it scrambled consumer confidence, employment, and discretionary spending across every market simultaneously. BlackBerry's collapse wasn't because cars stopped selling; it was because iPhones and Androids were genuinely better, and by 2010 most people with money to spend had worked that out. Between 2007 and 2016, smartphone ownership went from about 11 percent of the global population to roughly 35 percent—but it was the newer brands cannibalizing BlackBerry's share while traditional automakers were still offering the same sedans to an increasingly skeptical world.

What we're really looking at is two unrelated industries getting buffeted by the same economic winds, then tangling together in a dataset like two bits of seaweed. The human mind finds this sort of thing endlessly satisfying, which explains why we're all still here, staring at spreadsheets, waiting for the next implausible partnership to emerge. New cars and BlackBerrys both declined because nobody had money. That's all.