Quick Analysis: Punch buggy!
Quick Analysis is a series where I put together a quick analysis on things that come to mind. Today I was wondering about punch buggies, and why they’re not being sold anymore.
A friend and I play punch buggy a lot. Because of COVID, we have altered the rules a bit: text the other person a photo of a punch buggy, and if you send 3 in a day then that equals 1 punch. We (let’s get real, I) see a lot of punch buggy’s in a day, however, they all tend to be older models. I remember hearing somewhere that the punch buggy has been discontinued, and that this wasn’t the first time. This thought popped back into my head on my drive to work, “I wonder if we can figure out why they did that by looking at the data of car sales and economic well being”.
Let’s dive into the data — oh wait it doesn’t really exist..
So what do I need? I need car sales data and economic data. For the sake of time and ease, I decided to focus on US car sales and US economic data. I will keep my series data in years, and I am choosing a time frame of 1945 — 2020 to have a good before and after sample size (the car really started selling in the US in 1950–1979, and then again from 1997–2018).
I scattered the internet to find some sales data for the VW Beattle (the said “punch buggy”) but a single source didn’t exist. Since this was for fun, and most sources weren’t official in any capacity, I decided to find similar data ranges from at least two sources for the same dates, and if they were similar (not exact) then I would use them (on average there is a variance of ~2% for total sales given a particular year).
Geez, this is getting fun! 😄
So once I smacked together the data — VW Beattle data from a bunch of sources I brought together and US GDP and Event data from “The Balance” it was time to put the data together in a spreadsheet!
I then took my “developer” data, pictured below:
And turned it into my BA / PM data, pictured yet again below:
With 76 rows of “I see you but I don’t understand you” I decided to do what any good analyst would do: visualize-it. #tableau
Tabluize it! & show your results; conclusions.
Honestly, I love tableau. In less than 1 minute I have a nice and informative dashboard, and with tableau public, freely hosted!
Now, what can we extract from this data?
Well, 2 things — Americans apparently LOVED the original VW Beattle more than the sequel, and that both times when VW was in a bit of a pickle 🥒 they axed the Beattle.
Hmmm, crazy. Anyways, back to work!
Total time: 24 mins.
