What I don’t get is empty-barrel politics — Michigan lawmakers year after year shielding Detroit from pressure to innovate on higher mileage standards, even though Detroit’s failure to sell more energy-efficient vehicles has clearly contributed to its brush with bankruptcy, its loss of market share to Toyota and Honda — whose fleets beat all U.S. automakers in fuel economy in 2007 — and its loss of jobs. G.M. today has 73,000 working U.A.W. members, compared with 225,000 a decade ago. Last year, Toyota overtook G.M. as the world’s biggest automaker.span style="font-style:italic;">-New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, getting a bit exasperated over the brain dead domestic auto dealers.
Thank you, Michigan delegation! The people of Japan thank you as well.
Shortly the attacks on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, at the beginning of World War II, the auto industry ceased passenger car production and did not resume until the 1946 model year. Auto plants converted to plane and ship making in order to keep our armed forces stocked with the machinery needed to wage war against the Nazis and Japanese.
Yet here we are, six years after the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and Pennsylvania - by zealots from Middle Eastern countries where oil keeps their citizenry mired in backwards societies and archaic, repressive governments - yet today's auto industry refuses to do it's part to ween America off that oil.
True patriots would have immediately stepped up production on hybrid cars that could get us off Middle East oil within a decade. True American leaders would have done everything in their power to make such a transition a no-brainer for the auto industry executives.
But, alas, neither the American auto industry nor the American leaders have brains. I mean...if the industry was able to transition from AUTO making to PLANE and SHIP making in mere months back in 1942, it could have easily transitioned from AUTO making to AUTO making in 2001.
