DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

In case you missed the good news: SUV market slows to a crawl

• GM’s sales are off 7.6% in November.
• Ford’s sales fell 15%.
• Toyota’s U.S. sales rose 13%.
• Honda’s sales rose 8%.

The failure of a U.S. industry is not something I normally celebrate, but I’m making an exception here. U.S. automakers claim they’ve been producing huge luxury trucks because “that’s what Americans want to buy,” ignoring that they’ve manufactured that market. The reality, as documented in High and Mighty, is that SUVs were designed to reduce costs by exploiting loopholes in federal safety and emissions laws, yet be enormously profitable, e.g. $12k for each a Ford Expedition and $15k for each Lincoln Navigator. Whatever pain these duplicitous U.S. SUV makers are feeling has been in 15 years in the making.

If it’s really true that American consumers are recovering from the big-car brainwashing administered by a dozen-plus years of Detroit ad campaigns, maybe the auto makers will begin offering smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles, such as Toyota’s Prius or Honda’s Insight.

No, probably not: GM Keeps Its Greener Cars Out of North-America

While GM is in big trouble and ready to do anything to get people to buy its huge SUVs (employee discount, releasing the 2007 models in late 2005, etc), it has many perfectly decent vehicles that it only sells outside of North-America …
Yet GM doesn’t seem interested in importing [the 47 mpg Opel Meriva] or some of its other designs at a time when it’s clearly the direction the market is headed in.