The Detroit Three focused on pleasing the Wall Street slicksters and fat cat banksters, maximizing executive bonuses and buying off the union bosses – customers not so much. They bean counted the cars to death. Extreme cost and corner cutting produced cheap-assed nasty “crapmobiles” with tinny doors, hard plastic interiors, flimsy switchgear, body metal so thin you could dent it by looking at it hard, and woeful build quality. Mechanical Mean Time to Failure (MTTF) painstakingly value engineered to coincide with warranty expiry made parts and repairs cash cows. Sold as the “real deal,” an entire generation of consumers ran away from American cars.
