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Originally Posted by stevey_frac
50 years ago, GM was the biggest thing around. Why would they have re focused themselves? And the decline in market share was inevitible as more viable car manufacturers started selling cars in North America.
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That declining market share wasn't enough reason to refocus? It wasn't inevitable: the reason US car makers lost significant market share is because they just couldn't be bothered to build the kind of cars a lot of Americans actually wanted.
"And GM did start refocusing. They have offered the Cobalt for sale since 2005. It has a bullet proof engine, and has always had very good highway fuel efficiency at a low price point in the market."
35 mpg or so highway is what you consider good fuel efficiency? And it's still a medium sized car. As for Ford, what did they put their EcoBoost engines in? Small cars? I got stuck with one of their "small" cars once, as a rental. Felt like driving a bar stool, it was jacked up so high.
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50% of passenger vehicle sales are light trucks.
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Sorry, but the formerly Big 3 don't even bother to build light trucks. Medium (Ford Ranger &c) to grossly oversized is all. They've even poisoned the market so that the Japanese barely build light trucks any more - one reason the most common truck on the roads around here seems to be the '80s to mid '90s Toyota.
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I remain firm on the fact that you can't blame them for selling a vehicle the market liked. Most especially, you can't blame GM for that, when everyone was doing it.
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Except that the market didn't really like them all that much, first as evidenced by declining market share, second because the demand was an artificially-created fad. You see, that's the real problem with the market these days. It works fine in what you might call a state of nature, but when you get marketing professionals involved, they manage to twist it far out of that natural state. That's just what happened with SUVs: the automakers started down the marketing path so they could avoid the hard work of meeting emissions & mpg standards, then got sucked into the trap of believing their own marketing.