the car makers built what their customer base told them they wanted- that's the way business works.
whenever they offered smaller cars with less features, they didn't sell.
people in the USA like big vehicles, they like cup holders, and, for some reason, they like built in surround sound dvd systems. and we tend to like pretending we are better off than we are.
the market is changing, and they are working on it.
in the 90's, Toyota, Honda, and Nissan were trying to figure out how to make big trucks for the American market, instead of focusing on what they did best- small cars.
now that the pendulum is swinging back in the direction of environmental doom and gloom and the need for "energy independence" from the people that use the money from our oil to teach their next generation to hate us- it's like the 70's all over again- smaller vehicles and vehicles that use alternative forms of energy are "cool" again.
the foreign car makers merely have to dust off their notebooks from 10 years ago to go back to focusing on smaller more efficient cars, where the US auto makers need to learn how to do it again for the first time, since what they learned in the 70's and 80's doesn't really apply any more.
it's not that they are "unwilling" to do these things- it's just that they know what's involved and how long it will take and how much it will cost.
i know that GM, at least, is pulling on resources and knowledge from all of it's divisions all over the world to figure out a better way to make affordable cars for the world market. and i think Ford might be doing pretty much the same thing. Chrysler, however, is kind of on it's own these days, what with Daimler ditching them to the first people that would give them any money to take it off their hands.
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