The one thing that might just save the Big Three from a dinosaur-like extinction at the hands of the asteroid of conservation economics and mammalian foreign competitors is happening. (I think I let that metaphor run wildly out of control.) Emboldened by gas prices that would be falling like a rock from space if I weren't morally opposed to making the same comparison twice in a row, American consumers are giddily rushing out to purchase vehicles with worse gas mileage than the Model T. According to Edmunds.com, truck and SUV sales have outpaced car sales for the first time in eleven months, meaning that as long as the country remains in a panic-inducing economic death spiral, drivers won't be playing a hapless UN to Exxon's Dr. Evil every time they pull up to the pump.
Remember when filling your tank would cost... one million dollars?
The confirmation that Americans have the collective economic memory of that guy from Memento comes as good news in Detroit, where the one advantage American car companies still hold over the rest of the world is making big-ass suburban tanks that could transport the entire population of Wasilla, Alaska. Why do Ford & Friends thrive in that market? Because that kind of automobile simply doesn't make sense anywhere else - European streets are too narrow, Asian streets too crowded, and both regions pay several times what we do for gas.
In other words, foreign manufacturers adjusted because they had to. They didn't have a choice. And when the price of gas inevitably triples again in five or ten years, America will once again go through the process of bitching, losing money, and fretting over the unemployment chaos that would be caused by Detroit's collapse, because the brilliant executives running the Big Three couldn't possibly have seen this coming.
