"I Drive A Foreign Car. Should I Feel Guilty?"

So opens a guest commentary by Ira Lacher in today’s Des Moines Register. And if you believe the Detroit line, you might assume this voice from the middle American heartland would answer in the affirmative. You’d be wrong. Lacher describes his impression of American cars as being “designed and put together by committee – a bunch of parts cobbled together. The steering wheel felt as if it were just sticking out of the dashboard. The gas and brake pedals seemed mere appendages to the floor. The seats were uncomfortable frames covered with cheap cloth. This wasn’t a car; it was a homemade personal computer! By contrast, every rented Honda, Toyota, Mazda and Nissan seemed like a machine that functioned like one machine.” But when he recently purchased a Hyundai, Lacher clearly felt at least a few pangs of guilt.

“If the Big Three were in this much trouble a year and a half ago as I was car shopping, would it have mattered?” wonders Lacher. “Maybe. I might have taken Hyundai’s best offer to my fast-talking, quintessentially arrogant American-brand dealership and said, “Match this and you’ve got a sale. But based on my shopping experiences with them, I think I know what they would have said. I think they still felt that American consumers owed them something because after all, they were the American auto industry, the folks who remade the country, who beat the Nazis. They would have said, ‘No.’ And maybe that’s why even though the Big Three’s fall into Chapter 11 – and perhaps their demise – would psychologically and empirically hammer America, I wouldn’t feel responsible. It is not unpatriotic to want the greatest return for the money you work so hard to earn.”