So for my job, I had to drive back from SFO yesterday in a Chrysler Aspen, which you can see on the right. It's an awful car, representative of the poor ideas of Detroit these days. It bounces like a mechanical bull, turns like an elephant around a dime, accelerates suddenly and flightily like a little girl from a bee; it is a poor car. It has some superficial luxury but is totally unworthy of whatever was paid for it.

Point being is that the problems the American auto industry are having is partially a part of the labor problems and costs therein (the conventional reason for Detroit's failures), but mostly because the cars made there are crappy engineering-wise. Clearly what probably happened is that Chrysler thought, "Well, it's an SUV and luxurious, so whatever." Whatever pretty much happened. That's the attitude that led to Ford leasing its hybrid technology.