I would also argue that perhaps if you were a car company you might find that the guys on your team that could run marathons were Toyota and Honda. The guys on your team that were sprinters were BMW and Porsche. If the market change supported marathoners, and the government said you had to sell a marathon car for every sprinter, that BMW and Porsche might be in trouble. OTOH, Toyota and Honda don’t have any new challlenges and keep on running.

****Edited to make the analogy make some sense, I hope****

If the business was as simple as you make it out to be, anyone with the money to hire the engineers could make a competitive car in a couple years. It’s not that easy.

I am not in the car business, but I have been in the plane business. Many things take years and decades to move even little bits. It’s not just about ability. There is culture, desire, experience, prestige, suppliers, processes, egos, etc. You think that in the eighties, that if somebody wanted to gamble the future on a great small car he could have moved all of GM to do it? And why would he have? You have to know that most of the best people are going to avoid that whole division like it will kill their careers. Everything that is different, at all, will be a big stumbling block. You will have to spend more to make a cheaper car because most of the parts on the shelf aren’t really right. You have to spend more time and effort getting the suppliers to do something new, when they doubt you are really committed anyway.

Try talking to someone who has been in the business. Or a similar business. Heck, look at the PC industry where whole companies just die because they can’t make shifts and compete anymore. Add to all that the constraints of massive regulatory intervention and union issues.

It’s ugly dude. Sure it could have been done, I am not saying they didn’t fail, or that they could not succeed. However, I am one of their harshest critics, and I am telling you right now the deck is stacked against them, and has been for decades. I will blame them for a lot, but I give them a pass on the small car thing. It’s not their game, and the field isn’t level.

We can build great vehicles . . . when the management decides that we should and when they put actual resources into those projects.

Oh, about the bench, I added over 100 pounds to my lift. While I sure was not world class, I became a much better rugby player.

Anyway. Here is a last stab: I would bet that vs. your peers, you weren’t as good at pressing as squats. Even after your coaches helped. Not to be criticising, but you likely never moved beyond mediocre. You likely didn’t go on to be a world class press competitor. Well, world class is the ONLY way to be in the auto industry. Mediocre will end up getting you crushed.

Small cars from GM have become mediocre, but that’s not good enough. Still, they make some of the best trucks and SUV’s on the planet. They did fine with CAFE until the price of fuel went sky high (which lasted about a year?), and then they got nailed with the economy. There are lots of things wrong at the 3, and CAFE isn’t helping. It’s also not reaching it’s own goals. So we have an ineffective policy that is slanted against the domestic players. Not a great idea.

He’s been extolling the virtues of Corvettes for AGES! This isn’t news.

Exactly! Clarkson has always had a love for American muscle cars. The Shelby Mustang, the GT40, and the Corvette. His review of the ZR1 was glowing, favorably comparing it to Ferrari. He considers the original Mustang the greatest car of all time.

Richard Hammond, a co-host, has a similar love for the current Ford Mustang and Dodge Challenger, although he readily admits their faults.

I suppose their perception of American cars mimics the public at large. They were mesmerized with the charisma and glamour of classic cars, disappointed with recent ones, and beginning to see the promise and redemption of the latest models.

This ZR1 he drove from California to Utah where they participated (May driving CTS-V and Hammond the new Charger) in the drag races on the salt flats. Clarkson broke 176 mph in his ZR1, May broke 163 mph and Hammond 150. They all loved their American cars.

Lastly, you can now buy one of those great european small opels at Saturn. They lose money on every one. They still are not selling well.

I would love a euro focus, but everytime they bring one of those cars over here it fails to be a hit.

Lastly, Michael Jordan sucked at baseball. Can you imagine if the government decided he would be a baseball player when he was in college? What we would have missed out on!

This means that the domestics, whose best cars were always on the porkier side, has to build and sell cars that it’s not very good at making. The result is that they often sell them at a loss. With very few exceptions, this means that the foreign makers who traditionally specialized in four and six cylinder cars could keep doing what they knew best, while the American’s had to learn new tricks.

You can make all the arguments you want on how they SHOULD have done better, but that doesn’t change the results.

Those of us against CAFE point out that it has lots of shortcomings, and really hasn’t reached the left’s goals. We think we would all be better off without the rule, that if you want to reduce pollution you should reduce pollution or tax it. Same for consumption. Attacking the supply side is usually not the best way to get things done.

Detroit would have gone on making gas guzzlers at their own peril, or maybe, they would have used the profits from V8’s to learn to make smaller cars AT A PROFIT.

Hearing him wax poetic about American Iron just doesn’t seem… right.”

I’m pretty sure the ZR1 is still plastic. American plastic.

Taking the recent perfect storm of downward sales across the industry and temporarily high gas prices as a sign that the world changed against V8’s is a mistake. There will be a market for them for a long time to come. GM is losing money because of CAFE and small cars, not because of SUV’s. If they had back every dollar lost on little crap cars, they wouldn’t be begging for dollars now.

Well, you can buy the Hummer brand for a song and prove the world wrong. ‘Cause evidently those pesky sales numbers don’t show what people want.

“Buyers don’t want gas guzzling V8 cars and oversized SUV’s.” There are a lot of statements of complete BS that somehow pass for wisdom these days, but this one is right up there with the best.

He’s been extolling the virtues of Corvettes for AGES! This isn’t news.

At least he gets that part correct.

“de mortuis nil nisi bonum”

Hearing him wax poetic about American Iron just doesn’t seem… right.

Nice to see some sympathy for an industry on its deathbed, I suppose…

It is quite likely that MY2009 will be its only year.

Long after our grandchildren are driving air cars or bicycles to work they will still be talking about the ZR1.