Pickup trucks are three of the Top Ten Selling Automobiles in the U.S.

I've written before about the Big Three Automakers bailout, and about their propensity to push pickup trucks and other high-margin vehicles on us. I think I wrote a thing or two about the "cash for clunkers" program, as well.

The Big Three are banking on our collective inability to remember things that happened more than three months ago. They continue to push pickup trucks and big SUVs on us. (Well, except for Hummer. GM finally pulled the plug on the Hummer brand after a Chinese buyer decided not to buy the division.) And although I hate to acknowledge the reality of it, the American public continue to buy pickup trucks.

Nobody seems to remember what happened to gasoline prices and truck/SUV sales in the summer of 2008: gas prices went way up, and truck/SUV sales went way down. Or perhaps they do remember, but either they don't care, or they have convinced themselves that it won't happen again. Hey, people! Summer's only three months away. Gasoline prices will jump again!

Pickups are especially prevalent here in the American West. Sometimes during my commute, I will count the number of pickups vs. SUVs vs. normal cars at an intersection in town. I'm amazed at the margin by which pickups outnumber normal cars, and SUVs outnumber both.

Okay, I would enjoy owning a pickup truck -- but I'm not willing to give up my commuter car for it. A pickup truck has its place, but it's not in the driveway or garage of a suburban home or on the dry, paved roads between home and work -- which is where most of them in this part of the American west spend most of their time.

And it's not necessarily in the mountains, either. In September 2008, I drove my little Saturn SL2 up a steep, rutted, gully-washed, mining road in the Rockies, to get to the Grays and Torreys Peak trailhead on the Continental Divide. I drove past a huge line of 4WD PUs and SUVs, all waiting for some brave soul to show them how to negotiate the road. After I went past, they all pulled in behind me and followed me up to the trailhead. After we had parked, several of the drivers approached me and told me that I was an inspiration to them: they weren't sure they could make it up the road until they watched me do it.

As for snow, well ... the missus and I still remember fondly a 60-mile drive to Denver in a snowstorm, when we counted 18 pickups, Jeeps and other 4WD vehicles -- and only 2 (two!) normal cars -- that had slid or spun off the interstate highway.

Executives and employees at the Big Three in Detroit have a derisive term for all of these pickup trucks they're selling: "air haulers." And I do mean derisive. They're glad to take your money, knowing full well that for 360 days out of the year, the bed of your pickup truck won't hold anything that couldn't fit into the trunk of a (smaller, cheaper, and more economical) Civic, Corolla, or even Impala.

Here is a list of the top ten selling automobiles in the United States in 2009, according to Reuters:

Rank	Make & Model	2009 Sales	2008 Sales	2008 Rank	% Change
1	Ford F-Series pickup	334,922	436,022	1	-23.2
2	Toyota Camry	285,069	379,270	3	-24.8
3	Chevrolet Silverado pickup	261,142	402,191	2	-35.1
4	Honda Accord	244,579	333,011	6	-26.6
5	Toyota Corolla	240,755	307,071	4	-21.6
6	Honda Civic	223,751	304,297	8	-26.5
7	Nissan Altima	169,435	241,529	9	-29.8
8	Honda CR-V	158,573	171,193	11	-7.4
9	Dodge Ram pickup	155,467	213,684	5	-27.2
10	Ford Fusion	148,045	128,381	20	+15.3

(I swiped the table from msn.com.)

Pickup trucks claim three of the top 10 slots, and two of the top 3 slots. Surprisingly, only one of the top 10 is an SUV, and it's not even a domestic SUV: the Honda CR-V. Japan's own Big Three have six of the top ten slots: three for Honda, two for Toyota, and one for Nissan. The only domestic non-truck vehicle that made the top 10 was the redesigned Ford Fusion, whose sudden rise in popularity vaulted it from 20th place to 10th place.

Now, I have some good friends who really do haul stuff in their pickup trucks, and they really do need their four-wheel-drive to get to where they're going. I say more power to them. One could even call them "legitimate" pickup truck owners. One of my friends has a beautiful old Dodge pickup. Most of the time, he uses it to haul old Dodge pickup truck parts. Like my dad said once, I'll buy a pickup truck when I have something to haul around in it.

Tesla Motors and Lightning Hybrids: Two New Car Companies Worth Keeping an Eye on

In 2006, a three-year-old startup called Tesla Motors (http://www.teslamotors.com/) introduced the world to the Tesla Roadster, an all-electric, two-seat sports car that could go 0-to-60 in under 4 seconds, had a range of 200 miles, and was powered by about a zillion lithium-ion batteries just like the ones in your digital video camera. The Tesla Roadster only costs $101,000, and they sell so fast you can't even find one on a showroom floor.

Tesla recently announced its second model, the Model S, a sedan with a 0-to-60 time of 5.9 seconds, still a breathtaking time, especially for a family car that seats 7. The Tesla Model S sells for about $50,000, half the cost of the Roadster. I wouldn't turn down either one of them.

Tesla Motors is unique in that it's not located anywhere near Detroit, St. Louis, or any of the other traditional automotive manufacturing locations in the U.S. Its headquarters is in San Carlos, California, in the northern borders of Silicon Valley. Tesla Motors is an American company, but its components come from Germany, Norway, and the UK, as well as the USA. If you see any similiarities between the Tesla Roadster and the Lotus Elise, that's intentional: Lotus won a competition to design and build the Roadster's chassis, among some other parts.

Tesla Motors has been around long enough that it has gone through its share of intrigues, shakeups, and lawsuits. The founders have been kicked out of the company and the current CEO is Elon Musk, the South African genius behind PayPal. Dealerships are popping up in big cities nationwide, in preparation for the release of the Model S.

We wish Tesla well, and we wish we owned a Tesla with its carbon fiber body, kick-a$ acceleration and all-electric drive train. Maybe one day. In the meantime, there's another new player in the game.

In January 2009, an "automotive research and manufacturing company" based in Loveland, Colorado, calling themselves Lightning Hybrids (http://lightninghybrids.com/), quietly announced that they were developing a hydraulic hybrid automobile. They showed their concept car at the Denver Auto Show in April 2009, and had their prototype driving around the streets of Loveland in June 2009.

Lightning Hybrids hosted an open house on Friday, June 26. It was an invitation-only event, but everyone was invited, and you had to RSVP in order to find out the location. Several hundred interested guests crowded into their "garage" in downtown Loveland, to get a look at the prototype and the facilities, and to listen to the founders and employees of Lightning Hybrids talk with excitement about their creation.

The prototype is a model called the LH4, the "4" meaning "four wheels." A second model, called the LH3, is already in prototyping as well. The LH3 is a unique design in that it only has one back wheel. It's a tricycle that runs backwards. (I assume that the front wheels will be for both steering and propulsion, as research at Stanford and MIT has shown that a configuration like this with rear-wheel steering is inherently unstable.) Both the LH3 and LH4 will be 4-seaters.

The hydraulic hybrid propulsion system is analogous to the more well-known (think "Toyota Prius") electric hybrid propulsion system, with a hydraulic motor/pump and 5000-psi reservoir taking the place of the electric motor/generator and battery bank. The hydro hybrid system is 50 percent more efficient than the Prius' electric hybrid system, and it delivers enough horsepower to give the car the same kick-a$$ acceleration as the Tesla vehicles have been posting.

The LH designers have been fanatical about keeping the gross vehicle weight below 1000 pounds -- that's right, only 1000 pounds. (Or was it 1800 pounds? Help!) Like the Teslas, the LH cars have carbon-fiber bodies. The LH designers went the extra mile (sorry) to tweak the aerodynamics of their cars. The LH4 has only three body parts: the hood, the canopy, and the pan. The carbon-fiber pan gives the car a smooth undercarriage to reduce turbulence and drag in the boundary layer between the car and the road. The hood is the entire front half of the car -- no fenders, and no seams. The clamshell canopy opens and closes on hydraulic lifts, like an aircraft canopy or some of the futuristic concept cars from Ford and GM in the 1960s, so there are no doors, doorknobs, or door seams. Digital cameras take the place of side-view mirrors, and windshield wipers and radio antenna are recessed, retractable, or molded-in.

The result is a very slippery car that gets 100 miles per gallon in both city and highway. In the city, the hydraulic motor does most of the work, with the German-made Audi biodiesel engine only turning on to assist with heavy acceleration. On the highway, the high mileage is thanks to the super-efficient Audi engine, the lightweight construction, and the low-drag design.

LH plans to keep manufacturing costs low by buying off-the-shelf parts wherever possible. In a dark corner of the garage is the shell of a Mazda Miata resting on four jack stands, looking like something that was abandoned on a New York City street and stripped by, um, entrepreneurs for anything of value. Its dashboard, airbags and climate control system are now part of the LH4, as are key components of its suspension and steering.

Every component of the hydraulic system came out of somebody's online catalog. The (bio)diesel engine, as I mentioned, is a crate engine from Audi. Other key automotive components will be stock parts, purchased from other automakers or their suppliers. The only full-custom parts may very well be the body panels, window glass, and headlamp/taillight lenses.

In 2010, LH will expand into a manufacturing facility in Loveland, Colorado, large enough to employ 300 people and turn out 10,000 vehicles in the first year.

But at $39,000 and $59,000 respectively, the LH3 and LH4 may end up being LH's loss leaders. The company may end up making their real money on a couple of other product lines. First, they will sell an LH hydraulic hybrid retrofit kit for existing fossil-fuel-only vehicles. It wasn't clear to me if they will sell directly to manufacturers or to aftermarket garages (like Shelby, for instance). Second, they have applied for a $74 million economic stimulus grant to commercialize a plug-in hybrid electric (PHEV) drivetrain developed at Colorado State University. Even though their market niche is hydro hybrids, they have the expertise to do PHEVs as well, and it's too good an opportunity -- a local university, partnering with a local company -- to pass up.

When the Big Three were the Big Three and gas was cheap, independent automakers didn't do very well. Nobody remembers the Bricklin anymore, and the DeLorean only lives on as a time machine driven by Michael J. Fox. But the world has changed. Today, the Big Three are the Struggling Two and a Half. Gasoline is no longer cheap and plentiful. Maybe the market is finally ready for something different.

Sign me up. I'll take one of each, please.

Another automotive company bailout

They thought they could slide this one past us!

WASHINGTON (AP) - The House on Tuesday approved a "cash for clunkers" bill that aims to boost new auto sales by allowing consumers to turn in their gas-guzzling cars and trucks for vouchers worth up to $4,500 toward more fuel-efficient vehicles. ... Since the yearlong vehicle program is expected to cost $4 billion, lawmakers would attempt to find the additional money later this year.

This is a just plain bad idea. But the House of Representatives bought it, 298-119, and it will probably sail unopposed through the Senate as well.

Exactly what are Congress and the automakers trying to accomplish here? Reduce CO2 emissions? Stimulate auto sales (as they say)? Or give General Motors, Ford and Chrysler another handout?

Um, maybe buy votes in Michigan, Kentucky, New Jersey and every other state that stands to lose automobile-related jobs?

I don't know exactly what they're trying to do, but it's very clear what they're doing.

They're subsidizing people's poor decisions again.

They're rewarding past bad behavior and reinforcing current bad behavior.

And it's another bailout. A $4 billion bailout.

The Big Three pushed their gas-guzzling vehicles in past years. In fact, all three of them showed commercials touting their gas-guzzling pickup trucks last summer during the $4 per gallon gasoline mini-crisis, and in the fall and winter during the onset of the current financial crisis, and they're still doing it. American automakers have never been serious about selling more fuel-economical vehicles, and their advertising campaigns prove it.

So do their showrooms. Drive past any Chevrolet, Ford or Chrysler/Dodge dealer and compare the number of trucks, SUVs, and big cars with the number of small cars, hybrids and economy vehicles. That's right. They're pushing the big machines. It's as if nothing has changed in the last 12 months, as far as the Big Three automakers are concerned.

That's because that's where the big margins, and hence the big profits, can be found. It's all about money. For Detroit, it has always been all about money.

We must lay some blame on the consumers who bought these vehicles. They're the ones who had to suffer through the gasoline price crisis last summer, remember? I say, let 'em suffer. They chose to buy those big machines, now let them live with their choice.

But now the government wants to ease these buyers' remorse by subsidizing their purchase of more economical vehicles. These consumers are getting a government-subsidized $4500 discount, in addition to the trade-in value on their old cars, to buy new cars. (Okay, in some cases it's only $1500, but the article says "up to $4500," and that number shows up several times in the details. Live with it.)

Problem 1: Not everybody's gonna buy American.
Problem 2: Sellers are greedy.
Problem 3: Hey! What about the rest of us?!

Allow me to elaborate.

Problem 1: I predict that many people will dump their big American cars to buy smaller, lighter cars from Asia or Europe. I didn't read anything in the article that said the $4500 goes towards the purchase of an American car. So this won't help GM, Ford or Chrysler nearly as much as people think it will.

Problem 2: Car dealers won't be able to resist the temptation to jack up the price of the vehicles they're selling, to get their own piece of that $4500 pie. They won't be satisfied with just moving more vehicles through their lot. Don't be surprised to hear about salesmen negotiating with the buyer to "split the difference," so the buyer ends up paying $2,250 more than he should for a new car.

Problem 3: Once again, the good people of the United States are getting screwed. Let me explain that one in more detail.

First, it was home prices: those of us who bought houses within our means, who went responsibly through the traditional loan approval process, have seen our home values plummet because of the irresponsible actions of the borrowers, lenders, and investment entities who are really at fault for the current financial crisis.

Then, it was jobs: as the economy tanked and corporate profits fell, over 13 million hard-working Americans lost their jobs, while the executives who were truly responsible for the losses in corporate profits held onto their jobs, fired those 13 million, collected undeserved bonuses for their actions, and did absolutely nothing to relieve the suffering of their former employees. Do you know how many production workers you can keep employed if you replace an overpaid CEO with one who's willing to take a smaller bonus?

Then, it was tax dollars: while no politician has yet had the audacity to raise taxes on us, the politicians have been happily writing checks against our (future) taxes to pay for so-called "bailouts" for private industry: first the banks, and then the automakers.

(You may or may not remember, but when Congress said "no" to the Big Three the first time, General Motors tried to disguise itself as a bank (GMAC, its financing arm) and sneak in the side door, to get a piece of the bank "bailout" funds. Congress finally gave GM and Chrysler some money, but not as much as they wanted.)

Now, it's tax dollars again: this latest move by Congress is another attempt by somebody to give Detroit the rest of the money they wanted. If this plan works the way it's written, then every person who buys a new car under this plan will be shoveling more government money, $1500 to $4500 at a time, to the carmakers.

Hey! That's my money! Don't you go giving it to that Hummer driver! He's got more than enough money to replace that Hummer -- if he really wants to replace it.

Not only that, but: Hey! When are you going to reimburse me for my purchases? While so many other people have been buying trucks, SUVs, Caddys, Lincolns, and muscle cars, I've been driving economy vehicles since 1984! No government entity has ever given me a nickel for my good citizenship. Just like with the mortgages and everything else, the government is punishing good behavior and rewarding bad behavior.

GM is no longer "too big to fail." And Fiat almost gave up on their Chrysler acquisition because of meddling by the feds. I say, let 'em fail. Let the market sort it out. Enough with the government "intervention," already. You're making things worse, not better.

If you are as outraged as I am, please send this article's URL to your friends. Then print this article (yes, on paper) using Internet Explorer, and snail-mail a copy of it to your Senator, Representative and President. Make sure to include a cover letter expressing your outrage, and including your name and address so they know you're serious.

American automakers think we're stupid

Okay, the American economy is in meltdown. After 12 months, the experts finally decided to call it a "recession." Maybe this time next year they will have decided that it's not a recession, it's a depression. Those of us who are out of work must be smarter than those experts, because we already know it.

Credit is hard to get right now, because most of it is tied up in those "toxic securities" -- secret code for "bad mortgages," which the lenders and investors might as well write off and forget about, and start over.

The domestic automobile industry, at least that overweight segment of it known as The Big Three, has been in Washington D.C. twice begging for money to "bail them out," because they're too incompetent to bail themselves out of the mess they created. For years now they've been ignoring the signs of the times, the writing on the wall, the metaphor of your choice for the consumers who abandoned the Big Three in favor of Toyota, Honda and other Japanese (and Korean!) brands.

Detroit ceded the market for medium, small and subcompact sedans to Japan without a fight, choosing instead to concentrate on "luxury" cars, muscle cars, SUVs and manly pickup trucks. When gasoline jumped to $4 per gallon this summer and Americans suddenly stopped buying all those thirsty Detroit products, the Big Three's collective income fell far below their outgo, and they started losing money fast.

What Detroit should have done is instantly change their product mix and convert factories from making trucks and SUVs to making the smaller, leaner cars that Americans wanted. They should have noticed all the Priuses and Civic hybrids on the road and rushed to get their own hybrids into production. But they didn't have any smaller, leaner cars, and they didn't have any domestic hybrid options.

Actually, that's not strictly true. They didn't have any smaller, leaner cars that Americans wanted. What they offered for smaller cars was ugly and poorly put together. What they offered for hybrids got worse gas mileage than the Japanese non-hybrid alternatives, and again, they were poorly put together.

Our senators and representatives in Congress, bless 'em, were persuaded that giving Detroit zero dollars, while it would have been a bold and courageous move, might not be the right thing to do, but they were able to see past the Big Three CEOs' self-serving arguments and pare down their request to something more, um, realistic. I'd still like to see Congress try something bold and courageous for a change. But at least they got it down from over $30 billion to under $15 billion before the proposal got snagged on a tree branch.

In the meantime, while the car companies are crying to the government about all the money they're losing, Dodge aired a TV commercial this evening that makes one slap one's forehead and cry, "What in the world are you thinking?"

This was an advertisement for what Dodge called a "luxury truck": a dual-cab monstrosity with leather seats, built-in WiFi, a backup camera, built-in toolboxes, a really thirsty engine and a suspension that would do the Army proud.

Hey! Dodge! Which Americans are you trying to sell these air haulers to? Haven't you been listening to the majority of the American public? We don't want luxury trucks! We want vehicles that take less gasoline (or diesel), or no gasoline (or diesel) at all! These ain't them!

Dodge wants to push this "luxury truck" for one reason only: because of the profit margin. They make more money per sale on "luxury trucks" than on more sensible vehicles. I guess they don't expect people who need car loans to buy these things, do they? Because, according to the news and the CEOs themselves, car loans are hard to come by right now, so the buyers of these beasts will need cash.

The commercial, naturally, emphasizes the manliness of the truck, and appeals to the buyer's need to feel manly. The commercial goes over the top in an attempt to get the buyer's insecurity (or need to compensate for perceived deficiencies elsewhere) to override his caution and the frugal attitude so vital in this economic climate.

This truck is the reason why the majority of Americans don't want to give the Big Three one red cent of their money. It's symbolic of everything that's wrong with Detroit right now.

The first thing the Car Czar should do, once he's appointed and the Big Three get their bailout money, is fire the sorry idiots at Chrysler who approved the design and construction of the "luxury truck," and the sorry idiots who approved this advertising campaign, and the sorry idiots who signed the contract with the advertising company, and the advertising company itself.

After that, it wouldn't be a bad idea to go after the associated idiots responsible for the Cadillac Escalade, the Ford Excursion and supertrucks, and the Hummer product family.

Bailing out the Big Three automakers

You know, I don't think it's too much to ask that a car company build the kind of car we want to buy, instead of the kind of car they want to sell us. An AP wire service article in today's paper started with this paragraph: "Ford Motor Co.'s F-150 pickup is the top-selling vehicle in the United States this year, with more than 432,000 purchased through October. But when people stop buying the F-150, it's not just Ford and its workers that suffer." The article goes on to list all the suppliers whose products go into the Ford F-150 pickup truck, who will have to lay off workers and maybe declare bankruptcy if you don't buy a Ford F-150.

If you reread the article, you'll see that it's a thinly veiled attempt to make you feel guilty about not buying a Ford F-150 pickup truck, "the top-selling vehicle in the United States this year." Now there's a new strategy from the automakers: guilt as a selling tactic. Here's what they're really saying: "If you don't buy our truck, we'll go out of business before Christmas, and so will our suppliers, and it will all be your fault."

Do you feel guilty about not buying an American-made car? Let me tell you: earlier this year, we went shopping for a new car for my daughter. (For the record, we ended up buying American. We bought a used Saturn, built back in the days when Saturn still built high-quality vehicles.) We concentrated our search on high-quality, low-maintenance, well-built, compact models. That meant that we concentrated mostly on selected Honda, Toyota, Hyundai and Saturn models.

At one dealership, the salesman talked us into taking a non-Saturn, American model for a test drive. Okay, it was used, but it was less than a year old. The dashboard was cracked in several places. The seats were uncomfortable. Several of the little plastic screw covers were missing. The brakes were mushy. The steering was imprecise and unresponsive. The car was noisy, even at low speeds. The fuel economy on this model was much worse than on its Japanese and Korean competitors. And the Consumer Reports maintenance rating on this model was Very Bad.

I think that he was being a typical used car salesman, simply trying to push a lemon off his lot. But the experience reinforced our opinions about American cars. It's the latest in a long line of experiences that make me not feel guilty about not buying American.

For over 20 years, American automakers have ignored all of their former customers who have abandoned American cars for Japanese and German cars. If they had been wise and just a teensy bit humble, they could have asked us why we were buying Accords and Avalons instead of Aspires and Aspens, Camrys and Civics instead of Cavaliers, and then they could have redirected their engineering efforts to create cars that competed directly, point for point, with those Japanese models. Instead, they chose three different responses:

1) Ignoring or belittling the foreign car builders and their customers.
2) Blindly insisting that the Aspires and Cavaliers were competitive, continuing to build them with doors so heavy that they sagged after a couple of years, interior trim that rattled at high speed from Day One, and suspensions that transmitted all high-speed road noise right into the center of the occupants' skulls -- not to mention mechanical assemblies with known design defects and a propensity to break down frequently and in expensive ways.
3) Changing the focus by convincing the American consumer (and doing a frighteningly good job of it) that he really didn't want a small car, what he wanted was a large SUV or pickup truck, and the larger the better.

This is what they've been doing for 20 years. Hey, the writing was on the wall 20 -- no, 27 years ago. The Honda Accord started taking over its market segment in 1981. The Toyota Camry joined it a couple of years later, and Detroit followed the three strategies I described above in responding to the challenge posed by these two Japanese success stories.

It's gotten worse since then. The Big Three had two radical successes in the intervening years, but in typical Detroit style they fumbled both successes.

One was Geo, a joint operation between GM and Toyota. At one point, the Geo Prizm, Chevy Nova and Toyota Corolla were all the same car, with minor styling and badging differences. They were good cars. We bought a 1990 Geo Prizm when it was 9 years old, and it's still running today. I think it's been in the shop twice in all those years. You can't buy a new Geo anymore, and the Chevy Nova has been discontinued.

The other was Saturn. Saturn started as an autonomous division of GM, with a mandate to do things their own way, and to do them in a new and different way. The early Saturn vehicles had radical (but appealing) styling, and their construction quality was top-notch. Their cars got consistently high ratings from Consumer Reports. At one time our extended famly owned four or five Saturns. Then GM killed the goose that laid the golden egg. They took away the division's autonomy, put in too many old-time GMers to run things the old GM way, and destroyed the mark's reputation for inventive styling and for quality. Today, Consumer Reports rates Saturn quality as just as bad as any other American car.

Similar stories could be told about Ford and Chrysler, who each had a turn at the top of the heap and blew it, Chrysler with their minivans, and Ford with, um, their minivans! And the T-bird and Mustang revivals. (In 2007, Toyota sold more Priuses than Ford sold Mustangs. Ford didn't take the hint.)

In the past five years, all auto makers have realized the awesome profit margins that could be realized by building and selling pickup trucks and SUVs (and their bastard offspring, crossover SUVs). SUVs got bigger and bigger, and more expensive, culminating in the Hummer H2, Cadillac Escalade, and Ford Excursion. I'm still trying to figure out how they fooled the American public into rushing to buy these gas-guzzling monstrosities, but they did. Their marketing campaigns were basically, "Forget the small cars. Buy one of these instead." Those marketing campaigns were so successful that the Big Three turned off the small-car spigot. They converted engineering groups, assembly lines and entire factories from small cars to trucks and SUVs. In parts of Colorado, 5 out of 6 vehicles on the road were pickup trucks or SUVs.

The Big Three marketing departments expressed their contempt for the urban truck/SUV owner in the term they used to describe these vehicles. While comedians called them "urban assault vehicles," Detroit called them "air haulers."

A lot of people still wanted to buy the small cars, though. Too bad Detroit didn't have any to sell. I walked through local Chevy, Ford and Chrysler showrooms several times in the last few years, inquiring about small cars. The showrooms and the front rows of the lots were full of "air haulers." If you didn't want an "air hauler," then the second and third rows held Camaros, Mustangs, Sebrings and other macho muscle-car wannabes. The small cars, the only things that could answer to the Accord, Civic, Camry, or Corolla, were way in the back. The dealer had only invested in five or six of them, and since the profit margin on them was so much lower, he didn't push them at all.

Okay, back to this year. This summer, crude oil prices skyrocketed, and gasoline prices jumped accordingly. Suddenly it was expensive to drive an "air hauler," and they magically started disappearing from the roads. Consumers were selling their SUVs, or at least putting them in the garage, and buying economical cars to replace them. And what cars did they have to choose from? That's right! The Japanese ones! Detroit had ignored that market segment for so long that the American consumers in that market segment were now ignoring Detroit.

(I don't really mean to ignore European models here. It's just that the European cars are not even a force in the market anymore. In 2007, Toyota not only sold more Priuses in the U.S. than Ford sold Mustangs; Toyota sold more Priuses in the U.S. than Volkswagen sold cars, period.)

Some of you may respond by giving me the model names of Detroit's contributions to the small-car market. And it's true, I've even seen some of them on the road. But they're more of an oddity, an American exception bobbing up and down in the sea of Japan. And once again, go driving past a Big Three dealership, and see how many of those small cars are in the front rows on the lot or featured in the showroom -- that's right, not very many.

Finally, I need to point out that you don't need to fall for the "buy American" guilt tactic, either. "Buy American" doesn't mean "Buy Detroit." All of the Hondas, and most of the Toyotas, on the road are really American cars -- that is, they're made in Ohio, Kentucky, California, or Tennessee, and many of the parts inside them are made in the U.S.A., in the same factories that (used to) make parts for Detroit. That means that when you buy a Honda Accord, you're supporting that parts supplier after all, the one who used to make parts for the Ford F-150.

The first comment to this posting will be a letter I sent to my incumbent and newly-elected Senators and Representatives, and to the Speaker of the House of Representatives.