I'm not sure how the post addresses the "Here's How US Carmakers Could Catch Up" promise. While the hybrid-support niche could indeed be huge, I don't see how that helps the Big Three, which really should be renamed to the Formerly Big Three anyway. Stupidity still rates in Detroit. Case in point, the 2000 and later Corvettes, which have no tow points, no jack points, and thus no way to move from dead-by-the-side-of-the-road to a garage without suffering damage to the plastic skin. Ask any tow truck driver who's had the misfortune to be called out for Corvette assistance.

Detroit has always hated the small, the fuel efficient, and still to this day whines that they can't make cars that can meet higher CAFE standards, that it's too expensive to make cleaner cars, yada yada yada. They lied 30 years ago, and they're lying today. It's possible, it's not too expensive. They just don't want to be bothered. Fine, you can't MAKE them change their teeny quarterly-profit-focus minds, so buy better cars from companies that make them and wave goodbye to the walking dead of the US industrial sector. If gas stays up around $3/gallon or rises even higher, it won't take too long before that crashing sound you hear coming unseen from the woods signifies the end of Auto Detroit.

sadly, I don't think we can stand by and watch the US automakers fail. Time has an article in a recent issue about current US management and the tendency to focus on next quarter profits. The same problem is obviously in play at the "big" 3. The same shortterm myopia is what causes US companies to offshore our outsource. In doing so they give away the company secrets and advantage in customer service.

My point is that as the auto industry goes, so goes many other US companies. We need to turn more than just GM around.