[orange4boy]

I would like to add I'm not picking on US Americans to the exclusion of the rest of NA regarding marketing and PR. The article is talking about the Big 3 bailout and Lutz which is a US issue. (although Canada did add it's 10 cents to the bailout.)

I may be picking on GM, but let's face it they went bankrupt, not VW. And for the record, I'm not a fan european cars in general. I wish we had more of their diesels here though.

Large cars have always been preferable to the majority—they innately appeal to the fear and or lack of control people feel over their lives.

This is a vast generalization and oversimplification! People buy many different size cars for many different reasons. You hear that "gravitate towards large vehicles" statement all the time coming from "industry experts" (people paid to say the right thing) as though there is some invisible force compelling people. It may be one of the reasons someone buys a large vehicle but there are literally hundreds of criteria any individual uses to decide which vehicle to buy. This is a meme designed by public relations firms to give car companies an excuse to keep pushing these mammoths at us. Even Joe six pack who wants his 440 Hemi Challenger, I'm sure, would be happy if his mileage were better so he could afford more six packs.

Here's a study by the Brookings Institute from 2004.

Kenneth E. Train, Clifford Winston, U.C. Berkeley, Brookings Institution

http://www.econ.yale.edu/seminars/ap...ain-041104.pdf

Choice excerpt:

American industry has received various kinds of trade protection for more than two decades ostensibly to help it “retool” and has benefited from robust macroeconomic expansions during the 1980s and 1990s, it continues to lag behind foreign competitorswhen it comes to producing a vehicle of quality and value. It is particularly noteworthy that the loss of the American industry’s market share can be explained by changes in the basic attributes—price, fuel consumption, horsepower, and so on—that are included in our model, rather than subtle attributes such as styling and various options.

Conclusion:

Concerns about the competitiveness of the U.S. automobile industry developed in the early 1980s when Chrysler needed a bailout from the federal government to avoidfinancial collapse and Ford and General Motors suffered large losses. Since then, the profitability of the domestic industry has fluctuated while its market share has steadily declined. Investors in the stock market, who are the most experienced and crediblesoothsayers of an industry’s future, envision that difficult times lie ahead for Ford, General Motors, and Daimler-Chrysler as the sum of their current market capitalization is less than half the combined market capitalization of Honda, Toyota, and Nissan and less than Toyota’s market capitalization alone. Toyota’s consistent profits have allowed it to invest in environmental technologies, like hybrid engine systems, and to take risks, like starting a youth-focused brand, Scion, thereby increasing pressure on other automakers.

We have applied recent econometric advances to analyze the vehicle choices of American consumers and found that the U.S. automakers’ loss in market share during the past decade can be explained almost entirely by the difference in the basic attributes that measure the quality and value of their vehicles and foreign automakers’ vehicles. Recent efforts by U.S. firms to offset this disadvantage by offering much larger incentives than foreign automakers offer have not met with much success. The only way that the U.S. industry can stop its decline is to start building better cars than its foreign competitors. The transparency and timelessness of this conclusion suggests that the domestic firms face competitive difficulties that researchers and industry analysts have yet to identify

After all this, after all these years, GM is still not listening. The question is why? And why do the politicians keep bailing their asses out? Why do the business "leaders", so adamant that the free market should reign let this happen again and again?

Buy a junk car, pay for too much gas and maintenance, then pay to keep the company alive so you can buy another junk car and then pay too much for gas and maintenance.