by Rob Purifoy

Created on: November 23, 2008   Last Updated: February 04, 2009

The American auto industry is in this predicament for arguably several reasons but my first in the number of reasons is the lack of forward thinking. We can blame the downturn in the economy or the recent rise of gas prices but while the heartbeat of America in the form of GM was riding high instead of preempting the future economy. They kept building the heavy Detroit steel that they were always used to. They kept with the things that made them money in the past without realizing the foreign competition that was creeping up on them.

If we look at the history of the Detroit automaker, GM, for example, it's easy to see that they were a leader in the industry making big cars with big horsepower in the 1950's, 60's and early 70's. American cars were made of muscle, steel and horsepower but that would soon change. 1973 marked the end of the muscle car era when the government placed mileage requirements on vehicles and soon after that we had a gas crisis. During this gas crisis the automakers retooled to make smaller cars and smaller engines which didn't get much better mileage but also downscaled horsepower in the best selling sports cars. The late 1970's and 1980's spawned underpowered, lack luster vehicles which did not offer the American public any excitement but still we took what we could get. Back then the import car market consisted mostly of Datsun, a small Honda and Toyota trucks, no big competition. This is to say that American car makers got complacent, they watered down their cars, we accepted them and there was not much foreign competition.

This is the point in which American automakers should have been implementing alternative fuel and otherwise more efficient cars. They did dabble in the more efficient turbo charging with their Buick line in the late 1980's but soon after scrapped the idea. American car makers lost ground immediately upon the arrival of the import luxury lines of Toyota (Lexus) and Datsun (Nissan) and Honda which were the earliest competitors. The big 3 should have felt threatened around 1985 but instead remained complacent with their lack luster lines of cars. In this theory, it took the big 3 American automakers about 23 years to ultimately fail after feeding on their earlier 3 decades of success. GM failed in 1985 in my opinion, not in 2008. The lack of forward looking and forward thinking has led them down the path of today's destruction. Shameful as it may be, the economy will suffer greatly along with their failures.

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