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LONG BEACH, Calif. — Gleaming new Mercedes cars roll one by one out of a huge container ship here and onto a pier. Ordinarily the cars would be loaded on trucks within hours, destined for dealerships around the country. But these are not ordinary times. For now, the port itself is the destination . Unwelcome by dealers and buyers, thousands of cars worth tens of millions of dollars are being warehoused on increasingly crowded port property . And for the first time, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota , and Nissan have each asked to lease space from the port for these orphan vehicles. They are turning dozens of acres of the nation's second-largest container port into a parking lot , creating a vivid picture of a paralyzed auto business and an economy in peril. "This is one way to look at the economy," Art Wong, a spokesman for the port, said of the cars. "And it scares you to death." The backlog at the port is just part of a broader rise in the nation's inventories, which ...