Regarding America's Troubled Automobile Industry...

This past weekend, I wrote the following comments on my friend Flash's "Centrisity" blog-site (http://centrisity.blogspot.com/). I have modified the comments ever so slightly, simply for clarity's sake. Here are my comments:

Foreign manufacturers have a leg-up on U.S. car makers in ways other than employee benefits (though I agree that some adjustments must be done in that area). One of the other ways they have a leg-up is that they have always been forced to look outside of their own countries in order to meet profit goals; their home markets alone cannot meet overhead costs. Hence, they have innovated for their own needs as well as been flexible enough to innovate for the needs and wishes of people elsewhere.

Our (U.S.) car manufacturers, on the other hand, have been hopelessly myopic. Their sense of the world is almost non-existent, and their view of things is rather Palin-esque: if we want big trucks to look tough and/or compensate for small penises, etc., why, that's the only way to go. Hooray, hooray, U.S.A.!

Yet the rest of the world has different requirements and trends, and we should have been smart enough to adhere to both our wishes at home and the necessities of folks abroad who would rather like to drive U.S. vehicles. (I know many folks from outside of the U.S. who would like to drive U.S. cars and have done so in the past, but who have finally thrown in the towel and bought vehicles from other countries in recent years, due to the clumsiness of smaller American cars.)

The American Right can scream about employee benefits (and, to a certain extent, they may be right) and The American Left can talk about installing a Car Czar into the national equation (and, to a certain extent, that may be a pragmatic idea). But unless and until U.S. auto manufacturers recognize that we are going to have to sell (hopefully environmentally-friendly) cars to a good chunk of the 2.5 billion combined Chinese and Indians (as well as others elsewhere) in order to stay viable, everything that both sides of the political aisle in presently insular Washington (and Detroit) try to do is going to go down the drain.

The first step might be to get the unimpressive C.E.O.s of U.S. car companies to park their fancy private jets and take a good, old-fashioned world geography test. The results would be howling funny, I'm sure. Or at least they would be funny if the stakes weren't so high.

--Hasslington