With boom-time market certainties crumbling as far as the eye can see, and a gut-wrenching year in prospect, Japanese carmakers have begun muttering darkly of another spectre: the Cuba Effect.

To the die-hard nostalgic, the 60,000-odd vintage American Cadillacs and Chevrolets still pounding the roads of Havana are a triumph of ingenuity and defiance – for decades the 1950s era cars have been repeatedly patched-up and kept on the roads despite the US embargo on imported parts.

What worries Japan is the idea that, in horribly straitened times, the rest of the world – especially emerging markets – may develop a similar skill and taste for making endless repairs to their cars.

The repair habit would not, perhaps, develop on quite the scale or time-frame that has come to define Cuba's anomalous auto- market, but Japanese car industry insiders say that even a two-year-long worldwide flirtation with advanced car repairs would cause significant industry fallout.

The chief problem, as demonstrated by Toyota’s decision to suspend plants for two extended periods, is that the successful end of the Japanese auto industry is primed for perfection: the plants were designed and built not only on the assumption that US new car sales would be forever robust, but that any slack in “old world” markets would be picked up in the emerging markets of Brazil, India, China and Russia.

Smaller emerging markets in South East Asia also seemed on the brink of making the critical conversion from being scooter-dominated nations to ones where the roads were instead choked with cars.

At the back of corporate minds, as various Japanese boardrooms voted to expand capacity in the good times, was the rough sense that people would hold on to their new cars for about three years. The second hand market would always be there, of course, but the basic theory was that the world had moved into a phase where, like its home computers, mobile phones, clothes and furniture, buying new cars was a normal part of the scene.

The speed of deterioration in markets has taken everyone, from Australian mining companies and Greek ship owners to Malaysian plantation owners and Russian gas oligarchs by surprise.

What worries the Japanese automakers is that with all the supposed market norms in unprecedented disarray, have they perhaps over-assumed the long-term global appetite for new cars? Could - in the event of a prolonged downturn – everyone go a little Cuban and simply keep their existing cars on the road until well into the next decade?

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