Take this line from David Leonhart's article on Page One of Wednesday's New York Times:
"The real problem is many people don't want to buy the cars that Detroit makes."
Fact: For the past several years, GM sold one out of every four cars bought in America. Add the rest of Detroit, and it's close to one out of every two. Last I counted, that's a lot of people.
Then there's Times columnist Tom Friedman - who referred to GM as terrorists for marketing a campaign that provided gas relief and praising "green" Toyota.
Fact: Auto insiders know that Toyota's pose as "the green car company" is a brilliant marketing ploy - and deflected attention away from Toyota's own bid to get a bigger share of the highly profitable "truck" market with the launch of the eight-cylinder Tundra. Yet Friedman failed to even mention Toyota's gas-guzzling trucks... [snip]
The truth is, most Americans don't want to drive a Prius - especially not Americans with large families and lots to transport. And, while they want cars and trucks that are more fuel-efficient, they also want ones that are functional and safe - and the answer isn't just "hybrids, hybrids, hybrids,"
[which is why the Ford F-150 continues to be Ford's sales leader to this day. The cars are fine - quality wise and particularly design wise as the Big 3 are better a making the bigger vehicles most Americans (away from the coasts) want. I.e., it's not the cars...
It's the unions, period. Last year Toyota and GM both sold 9.3 Millions vehicles in the US (a bad year, it's usually double that). Toyota made ~17 billion doing it, GM lost 38 billion doing it. You figure it out.]
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