Not really, the focus groups are designed to give the prospective clients a limited number of choices, and they're forced to pick between what's offered to them. It is exceedingly rare for car makers to ask customers, "What do you want in a car?" (And it should be apparent that they don't always listen to what focus groups tell them, otherwise they'd have never brought out the Aztek. Nobody liked that thing, and even Pontiac's own promotional material struggled to find positive things about it.)
Tell that to Honda, Toyota, Nissan, and Mazda, all of them made boatloads of money even before gas prices spiked.
Big does not have to equal heavy, unaerodynamic blobs, but that's what US car makers turned out.
The market has changed, and they are playing "catch up," again. Just like they did back in the 1970s.
You'll note, however, that none of the imports totally gave their lines over to the big gas guzzlers, and that each of them were highly successful in their large vehicle launches.
Higher gas prices were inevitable and not something that they should have been unprepared for. Indeed, many of the foreign makers weren't, as they never stopped producing diesel cars, which get mileage equal to that of the hybrids, if not better. Toyota was the first out the gate with a hybrid, and the domestics laughed at Toyota, thinking it would never sell. We see who's laughing now.
Wrong. Saturn built small cars in the 90s, and GM certainly has access to all kinds of technical information since it owns Kia, Hyundai, and has a joint partnership with Toyota (and Honda) in building some cars.
It takes anywhere from 2-5 years to go from drawing to production, depending upon how much of a design change is involved, with a price ranging from a few hundred million to a billion dollars. Ever read an insider's perspective of the auto industry? Several of them have been written, save for the ones written by CEOs or former CEOs, they all describe working in US car makers as a cluster, with no clear vision of how to do things, and projects constantly going awry because of interfering middle management types who've no understanding of anything to do with the automotive industry poking their heads into things. That anything gets produced at all is a wonder.

I've spent the last 10 years working for various automotive suppliers, with part of that time in the Nissan plant in Smyrna, TN, and I can tell you that there's a world of difference between what the domestics will accept, and what the foreign makes will handle. I've also watched cars go from being stamped out of raw sheet metal, to rolling off the finally assembly line, and had a hand in putting the cars together. The Japanese car companies are focused on cost and quality like you wouldn't believe. If a part has a cosmetic defect in an area where only the person who installs it on the car can see it, it's rejected by one of the Japanese car makers, whereas a domestic's liable to take the part, even if it doesn't meet the operational specs. In a Japanese plant, everyone works, while in a domestic car plant, who does what, and how much they do of it, is governed by strict union rules. In a union plant, an employee who has a bit of down time (say the line's down, or they've managed to get their job completed in less time than is required) and decides to clean their own work area (you know, grabbing a broom or disposing of some trash) will quickly find themselves subject to the wrath of the union, while in a Japanese plant, this sort of thing is encouraged.

Again, I am not claiming that the car linked to in the OP is something that everyone would want to buy (or even anyone, for that matter), or that car makers are keeping technology locked up because they're in cahoots with the oil companies. I am saying, that they've quite clearly dropped the ball in terms of getting better fuel economy out of cars. People like to claim that government is just some large bloated mass that is incapable of getting anything done, what they forget, however, is that large corporations (like the car makers, software companies, etc., etc., etc.) are just as big, if not bigger (especially when you include subcontractors, many of which are simply spin-offs from the larger company) as many national governments. That some of them can be flexible and adapt to rapidly changing conditions, in spite of being huge monsters, is a sign that the corporate culture is such that they reward flexibility.

Note, also, that I've pointed out that the Japanese developed technology to improve fuel economy (up to 10% in city driving) in the 1960s, but it didn't show up in automobiles until Toyota put it in the hybrid, and just now is one other company looking to put it into a non-hybrid, and no one can claim that they were held up by patent rights, as any that Toyota would have had on it, would have expired in the 1970s. Heck, if you had the necessary skills, Mother Earth News in the early 1980s showed you how to convert your car to a hybrid. The answers are pretty much out there, and have been for quite some time. (Jay Leno thinks that steam is something we should give another look at. Honda and BMW are both looking at steam to suppliment their engines, so I'd say that the former Mercedes mechanic and avid car collector Leno isn't exactly crazy in his thinking.)

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