You know I'm sick of the bias against the American car makers. Just look at the first poll question. Toyota sells the Prius so it can sell more SUV's too. Like it or not that is where the profit is for all car companies. The Pruis only became profitable this year I believe. Oh and Toyota is pushing their large new pickup hard.

The bigger the vehicle, and the fancier the decor, the higher the profit margin. American car makers and Japanese ones alike benefit from this reality. Big is not necessarily that much more difficult or expensive to make, just more profitable.

All car makers have excess capacity: they can make far more cars than they can sell. In this condition, ways to increase the value of their respective stocks are limited to such things as: steal niche customers (JEEP -> Hummer) with a sexy overpowered novelty design; close plants and/or layoff workers; outsource parts making; buy out a competitor; or sell bigger cars to customers with more money than sense. Sound familiar?

To add to Jilted's comment the new Toyota full size pickup gets way worse MPG than the new Chevy Pickup and the Chevy makes more power.

Chevy Silverado 2WD (315HP V8): 16/22 mpg
Chevy Silverado 4WD (315HP V8): 16/20 mpg

Toyota Tundra 2WD (271HP V8): 15/18 mpg
Toyota Tundra 4WD (271HP V8): 15/18 mpg

How's the Toyota green koolaid taste now. BTW all talk of a hybrid pickup is gone and Yota is talking E85. Seems to me GM got slammed for touting it not too long ago....

"These are the last acts of desperate companies grasping at straws" oh please. I don't think the American automakers will go away any time soon. They and their product lines will probably look very different than they do today but they won't go away.

The Volt is a great concept idea, divorcing the gas engine from directly driving the vehicle. Thus any power sorce can be the generator. Gas or diesel today, fuel cell tomorrow. Slap some solar panels on the roof for a trickle charge while parked all day. Remember companys show concepts to gage interest. Forget who makes it, if you like the concept give positive feedback. The industry as a whole is listening....

This is a weird outcome. Are many of you saying you would not buy a Volt???

I swear, the readership here just needs to have a corporate boogyman. It was Wal Mart, but after the avalanche of green moves they made, the readership just couldn't keep bashing them. So enter the US automakers. Such base hoi-polloi behavior y'all.

Cripes people! Toyota ain't no saint, as Jilted points out, they just caught on quicker.

Last gasp my butt. These are big companies with a lot of stockholders. You'll all eat your words and happily buy a Volt-like product from them in the next 8 years. Could be SOONER if you showed these efforts some damn support.

Somewhat agree with the comment about bias against North American Auto Makers.

Toyota is proudly displaying a bigger, badder Tundra at the auto show as well, presumably to compete with the F-150 and other full size pickups.

I think the auto buyers in North America are as much, if not more, to blame than any company that makes the product.

GM is in sever financial troubles and thats a fact. Chrysler isn't even an American car company anymore. Who knows what ford is really doing(beyond the f150).

I see GM playing catchup and positioning to what the market is giong to really want(buy). GM has been working on their drive-by-wire and fuel cell stuff for years. but, fundamentally their quality of vehicle over the long run just doesn't compare to other auto manufacturers and thats been a sad fact ever since the strong competition came into town.

All that said. If I needed a "Work" truck, I would probably get a GMC. go figure.

Personally I think the end is nigh, we don't give a care. There are no Winston Churchill's, no FDR, there is no JFK, no Martin Luther King, no Mahatma Gandi. Hell we don't even have any half baked people. We have raw untalented idiots...

So because I can't assure ourselves that we will have a moment after we die, let us use this moment. To have a moment of silence for all of our upcoming deaths.

What do they have to do with cars again?

As somebody who works in the low levels of Ford's engineering departments, I can guarantee you they don't care about the environment until there's a regulation in place to force them. This isn't because they're a bad company necessarily, I think it is mostly because they are incapable of making simple common-sense changes, let alone taking a revolutionary new direction in car concept and design. Once the culture of incompetence changes on the inside, the cars they output will improve immeasurably.

I do not have first-hand experience of other auto makers, but given the products available on the market today, I imagine they're all on the same page. Profit comes first, planet comes ... hmm, not even second, somewhere around fourty-ninth, I imagine.

Nothing wrong with SUV's, if you make them electric, look at all that extra battery carrying capacity! That should silence the range issue.

Perhaps GM and Toyota should follow Phoenix Motorcars lead http://www.phoenixmotorcars.com/

I'm old.

And I'm an engineer by trade - computers these days.

I've owned a Ford, a Mercury, a Pontiac, a Buick, two Chevies, two Plymouths, two Dodges, four VWs, a Porsche, a Nissan, a Honda, and most recently a 2002 Prius - all of these cars being my daily drivers for years. I drove my Pontiac 100K and my Karman Ghia 200K miles.

I haven't ever bought a car (with the exception of my first which was a 1968 Pontiac Catalina) without seriously surveying the market and test driving multiple vehicles first.

I think I am qualified to say that Toyota has fundamentally better products than GM or Ford.

In fact, in general, I have to say American cars totally suck compared to Japanese and German cars.

That's not "America bashing" or "corporate bashing" that's cold hard facts - based on real world experience and not glossy literature or jingoistic propaganda. I'd much rather buy an American car... if only Americans would build one worth buying, that I could afford.

I'm waiting, America. Stop crying and build something.

Fish rot from the head down. The problem is not US workers, it's US managers.

Toyota, Honda and Hyundai all manufacture most of the vehicles they sell in the US in the US with US workers. These are the vehicles that get good ratings and sell so well.

When the Prius has a waiting list and GM has months and months of unsold Hummers sitting on lots and not only keeps building more but wastes money designing new ones, that tells us that management at GM is disconnected from reality.

And don't even get me started on Ford's Excursion that was so big it wouldn't even fit in a standard garage.

I am convinced Consumer Reports, JD Power, and other "quality" watchdogs have brain washed the american car buying public. The new Honda Accord, for instance, has a cheapened, clunky, awkwardly designed interior, yet these magazines rave about it. If cars such as the Chrysler Sebring were to come out with a Toyota or Honda name on it they would be all the rave, yet because it's a Chrysler they dog it for having cheap materials, etc. There's something fishy there for sure.

I am convinced Consumer Reports, JD Power, and other "quality" watchdogs have brain washed the american car buying public. The new Honda Accord, for instance, has a cheapened, clunky, awkwardly designed interior, yet these magazines rave about it. If cars such as the Chrysler Sebring were to come out with a Toyota or Honda name on it they would be all the rave, yet because it's a Chrysler they dog it for having cheap materials, etc. There's something fishy there for sure.