There is a simple reason why the American auto industry is in trouble: it failed to keep up with the times.

Yes, I know it was saddled with legacy costs in the form of pension and healthcare obligations - a good argument for comprehensive healthcare coverage, by the way - but it also failed to meet the challenge posed by its competitors, most notably Toyota.

As Fred Simon of Simon Chevrolet noted the other day, Toyota's rise to become the world's number one auto maker is a very old and very well known story - namely the children's fable of the tortoise and the hare.

Take the Toyota Corolla. There is nothing glamorous about the Toyota Corolla. But more Corollas have been sold since they were introduced in 1966 (into the U.S. in 1968) than any other car - including the Volkswagen Beetle.

Why? Well, you all know the old mantra about the three most important criteria in determining the price in real estate: location, location, location.

As far as the Corolla is concerned, it's been: reliability, reliability, reliability.

Reliability, Reliability, Reliability

Indeed, that mantra could be applied to both Toyota and Honda; how else explain the perennial best selling cars in the U.S. being the Toyota Camry, the Toyota Corolla, the Honda Accord, and the Honda Civic. Month after month, year after year.

And while the Corolla and other plain, sensible Japanese Janes have plodded slowly along, the American auto industry has floundered around, first by failing to produce small, reliable cars in the 1970s and 1980s and then by putting all its eggs in the SUV gravy train in the 1990s and the early years of this century.

Now Chrysler and General Motors are fighting for their lives while Ford is hanging on.
This is a truly pathetic story. These companies were once the best in the world producing vehicles that were simply sublime.

But they were blind to the challenge posed by the Japanese auto companies, indeed ridiculed it for many years, just as the hare ridiculed the tortoise.

And whenever they were asked to make more fuel efficient and less polluting vehicles, they whined and whimpered in a most un-American, Can't Do way.

Obama's new fuel efficiency standards

Now President Obama is setting a nationwide standard to build vehicles that average 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016, noting that could reduce carbon emissions by one third.
Interestingly the industry has been supportive, with most of the top brass standing with Obama when he made his announcement.

I can only hope that the crisis that the industry currently finds itself in does not allow it to be overcome by the kind of dopey defeatism espoused in a recent article in USA Today.

Headlined, "Safety could suffer if we boost mileage by making cars smaller," the piece argues that the only way to make cars more fuel efficient is to make them smaller and that will lead to more deaths on the highways.

"Smaller vehicles do not protect their occupants as well as large ones," it quoted Adrian Lund, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

Duh! Of course big vehicles are safer! Does that mean we all have to drive around in converted truck cabs?

The fact is that enormous strides have been made in making vehicles safer in recent years - front and side airbags, crunch zones, seat belt requirements are but a few examples. And while a collision between a very small car and an SUV is an unfair contest, there are plenty of SUV rollovers to make up the difference.

So I earnestly hope the American auto industry does not get sidetracked into stiff-arming and delaying the application of the Obama administration's new guidelines in the name of safety.

Because if it does, there is plenty of competition out there which has already proved itself to be Can Do. Remember the Partnership for the Next Generation of Vehicles, a 1993 initiative to provide seed money for the American auto industry to develop fuel efficient vehicles?

No, I thought not because it did no such thing. While General Motors developed the EV1 electric vehicle and the Detroit Three were all on their way to develop hybrid diesels, Bush scrapped the program in 2001 and the industry scrapped their programs and focused on the money-making SUV market.

Meanwhile, Toyota had separately gone ahead and developed the gas-hybrid Prius!

- Peter C.T. Elsworth