Drone footage shows desolate streets of Wuhan

This isn’t a car story. It’s an absence of cars story. The New York Times today posted drone video footage from Wuhan, China, which is the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, and where residents have been ordered by the state to stay inside.

Which virtually all of them are doing — all 11 million of them. That’s a population larger than New York City or London. In the video, you can see a small handful of cars in motion, or a pedestrian or bicycle here or there. Otherwise, the place is empty, desolate, like a scene out of a post-apocalyptic novel.

And of course that means no one is working. Automakers with factories in-country have shuttered operations across China until at least next week, but Hyundai today became the first automaker to stop its production lines elsewhere — in Hyundai’s case, five factories in South Korea, due to a shortage of parts out of China.

For the latest on the death toll, numbers infected, and other developments in the outbreak, follow the Times’ coronavirus roundup.