Name: How American Cars Got So Bad
Uploaded: 2025-07-24T10:42:49.000Z
Duration: 17 min 49 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

In late 2008, the CEOs of General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler pulled up to the Russell

Senate office building in DC following a 500-mile road trip from Detroit.

Each drove one of their company's newest, most fuel-efficient hybrid vehicles—Chevrolet

Malibu, Ford Escape, and Chrysler Aspen—in an effort to repair their tarnished public image.

The previous month, they'd traveled to DC by private jet and, well, the media didn't love the optics of CEOs burning tens of thousands of dollars of jet fuel in order to beg for a bailout.

This time, though, the strategy was to be more conciliatory.

Quote, "'We're here today because we made mistakes,' General Motors' Rick

Wagoner told the Senate Banking Committee."

Quote, "'We're sorry to be asking for this support.'"

This trio of American auto manufacturers had long been referred to as the Big Three based on their historical dominance of not only the US, but the world auto industry.

And yet, here in the United States, the country where Henry Ford invented the Model T and car-shaped post-war culture, the three companies that had built that legacy were failing.

Though the decline occurred quickly, the circumstances leading up to it did not.

In the mid-century, the auto industry was relatively unregulated and vehicles were big, loud, and dirty, but legislation in the early 60s started to target air pollution and automobile safety through efforts like emission standards, which required automakers to cut hydrocarbon and oxides of nitrogen emissions by more than 50% by 1975, and essentially made the popular muscle cars of the 50s and 60s extinct.

This era of regulation also included the implementation of seatbelts and bumpers, which, while inarguably worthwhile, shook up the pecking order of the industry.

Everyone had to change, which made it easier for newer competitors to step in.

In 1958, Toyota introduced the first Japanese car into the US market, the Toyota Crown, and over the next decade others would join, like Honda, Nissan, Mitsubishi, and Mazda.

The timing couldn't have been better, as Americans faced not one, but two oil crises during the 1970s.

The more fuel-efficient Japanese vehicles were increasingly attractive, and the country's exports to the United States more than tripled in five years to upward of 650,000 cars delivered to America by 1980.

This could have been the point when American car manufacturers recognized the risk of volatile fuel prices as an opportunity, and they could have prioritized smaller, lighter, and more fuel-efficient cars, but instead, the big three, partially driven by government policy incentives, put their energy into trucks and sport utility vehicles.

This focus on trucks and SUVs allowed Japanese automakers to corner the passenger car market.

In 2006, of the Consumer Reports list of the ten best cars, all ten were Japanese.

At the same time, the American auto industry lacked the offshoring capacity of Japanese automakers, and depended more highly on costlier American labor.

In the United States, the United Auto Workers Union was a source of pride, and yet pensions, healthcare, salaries, and legacy benefits all added up significantly, with labor accounting for roughly 8% of a car's price.

Japanese autoworkers weren't unionized, so, as Americans experienced yet another oil crisis in the 2000s, they once again looked to smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, mostly made in Japan.

American auto manufacturing figures continued to decline, dropping by nearly 50% compared to just a decade earlier.

The Great Recession loomed, and the economy started its precipitous fall triggered by defaults on subprime mortgages.

Though seemingly distinct, car sales were also wrapped up in the subprime mortgage crisis.

In fact, some 24% of automobile sales in 2006 were financed by home equity lines of credit, and once people started failing their mortgages, they also missed car payments just as others pulled back spending in general in fear of the recession.

Panic gripped the big three as the threat of bankruptcy increased, so they formed an argument that their failure would be a problem not just for Detroit, but for America.

The companies asserted that the crumbling of the American auto industry could ripple across all parts of the American economy and beyond, endangering supply chains and dealer networks beyond their own.

They testified in front of Congress saying as much, and requesting billions after disclosing they'd burnt through $18 billion in lines of credit.

A vote on a version of the bailout failed, but eventually, as the risks of bankruptcy grew ever more concrete, President Bush went around the legislative branch and approved $17 billion in immediate funds, with more to follow once Obama took office.

Given a lifeline by the federal government, GM literally became a new company as the General

Motors of old went into bankruptcy, became the Motors Liquidation Company, and sold its valuable assets and name over to the new government-backed GM.

To get back into fighting shape, this new company shed.

It shut down the Hummer, Saturn, and Pontiac brands and sold Saab within a year.

It cut down its plants, it cut a third of its employees in the US, 35% of its American executives, and it vowed to maximize efficiency with its trucks, and to begin to build the cheaper, fuel-efficient cars of the future.

The new Chrysler followed a similar strategy—it'd lean into the brands that worked—Dodge,

Jeep, Ram, Chrysler—it'd make the suddenly-in-demand sedans better, and it'd lean on the expertise of its new partner, Italian manufacturer Fiat, to overhaul its light passenger vehicles.

Even Ford, able to narrowly escape financial ruin without federal funds, signaled that it was pivoting.

It had rid itself of luxury brands like Aston Martin, Land Rover, and Jaguar in the years leading up to the recession.

This, along with the development of the Fusion, Focus, and bringing along the Fiesta, put

Ford in a position to lead what seemed like a quickly-transitioning American automotive sector.

Taken together, America's big three had been punished for pursuing strategies stuck in the past, and were now vowing to figure out the smaller, fuel-efficient cars of the future.

Fast forward ten years after the world hailed Ford as the future Ford company so proactive it was able to outmaneuver the recession, and you find a very different company—a car company telling the world it would no longer be making cars.

In 2018, Ford announced that it was getting out of the business of manufacturing or selling any passenger cars beyond the Mustang in the American market.

No more Fusions, or Fiestas, no more Focus.

In just a decade, a 180, and one that seemed inevitable within the company given lagging sales and build issues.

They weren't the first of the domestic giants to make the pivot, either.

Chrysler made the move in 2016 when it announced that it would be ending the production of the Dodge Dart and Chrysler 200, the brand's two economical sedans, and only continuing the production of the muscular Challenger and the comparatively luxurious Chrysler 300.

GM likewise followed suit—by the 2020s, it had announced the end of the production of the Chevy Impala, Cruze, Volt, and Malibu, the Cadillac CT6 and XTS, and the Buick LaCrosse.

Within a decade of nearly bleeding out on account of a lack of intentional adjustments for the future of the car market that seemed green, economical, and small, America's big three had all but stopped making cars for the American market entirely.

In an era that experts refer to as perhaps the most disruptive decade in a century of automobile manufacturing, it was then telling that the big three all announced that, in the wake of cars, they'd now be again focusing on SUVs and trucks.

Now, on the surface, such a move makes sense, as the demand for SUVs and light trucks in the US has appeared insatiable since the Great Recession.

But that demand is rather artificial in nature.

Auto bailouts may have saved jobs, restructured C-suites, gave core American companies a new lease on life, and presented a future of more reasonable and efficient American-made vehicles, but they didn't fix a critical shortcoming in the American car market—the definition as to what, exactly, counts as a car.

This is a graph of the share of total light vehicle sales between passenger cars and light trucks.

Nearing 80% in recent years, the share of light trucks in the US has hit a truly absurd number.

But, this number becomes easier to fathom once one considers what is actually labeled a truck.

This, for example, by definition, is a truck, as is this, and this, and that's thanks to legislation dating back to the 1970s.

With the energy crisis of the 70s came a push to mandate better fuel efficiency.

With that mandate came the Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards, which allowed the

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to set fuel-efficiency, mile-per-gallon standards on passenger cars.

In doing so, there needed to be a definition as to what was a passenger car, and what was not.

So, what became this definition for a light truck—6,000 pounds or less, designed to transport property or people, or generally designed to work off-road?

These qualities, especially the latter, are all pretty nebulous in nature.

Aside from weight, they simply don't exist in black and white.

But the ability to match these qualifiers comes with an advantage—a lower required miles per gallon.

These lagging fuel-efficiency requirements are the bedrock of what's referred to as the SUV loophole.

But building on that, another component of this loophole has to do with the 1964 Chicken

Tax—legislation that puts a retaliatory tariff of 25% on trucks manufactured abroad—another legal particularity that has made trucks, and therefore SUVs, a safe bet for domestic automotive manufacturers.

Now, over the years, foreign automotives have adapted—Toyota makes trucks here, Honda makes its SUVs here, and Hyundai here—but the Chicken Tax presents further justification for domestic manufacturers to build SUVs, as their competition is hamstrung by the fact that they too have to employ American workers to build SUVs that effectively count as trucks in the US.

While not a loophole, a final justification as to why the big three have turned their businesses back to trucks and increasingly only trucks is the fact that the profit margins are just better.

There isn't much of a difference from sedans in terms of labor requirements.

While they're bigger, the additional material is negligible.

But because they're so advantaged through the SUV loophole, domestic manufacturers have spent decades marketing high-yielding SUVs and trucks as safer, more reliable, more capable, and just plain necessary for every and all Americans, urban or rural, blue or white-collar.

While big three executives will mention high demand for light trucks as the reason they've given up on cars, their strategy in marketing created that very demand.

With this focus, the big three seeded market share, and today only comprise 40% of the

US industries—a far cry from their glory days.

But part of their disinterest in competing in the car market has to do with the fact that they're no longer very good at it—consumers just don't trust US automakers.

In 2024, Chrysler, Ford, and GM initiated the first, second, and fourth most recalls amongst car brands in the US, respectively.

In 2025, no Detroit brand cracked the top ten in Consumer Reports' auto reliability rankings, and only one time has a big three brand, Buick, cracked the top 11 in the last three years.

Beyond rankings and recall statistics, there's been some reputational black eyes along the way too.

While far smaller in scale, Chrysler, like Volkswagen, found itself embroiled in an emissions testing scandal in the 2010s.

Certain Jeeps and Ram trucks built from 2014 and 2016 were found to be violating emissions standards even though they had passed lab tests before hitting the market.

This resulted in over a billion dollars in settlements and fees for Fiat Chrysler, and eventually a guilty plea to a criminal conspiracy to cheat emission testing.

In 2025, GM ordered a recall of some 600,000 vehicles powered by the L87 engine.

The general consensus was that it was a long time coming—in fact, far too long.

For six years, consumers have been registering complaints about the massive 6.2-liter V8 that powers Suburbans, Tahos, Silverados, Escalades, Sierras, Yukons, and any other big GM vehicle completely and catastrophically failing within 100,000 miles of ownership.

GM looked into it internally in 2022, 23, and 24, but nothing came of those investigations.

Not until the NHTSA got involved did it come to light that certain crankshaft, connecting rod, and engine bearing malfunctions were common across some 28,000 registered complaints.

And more troubling, some 12 crashes and injuries along with 42 fires were potentially associated with these engine problems.

Across the board, the big three just don't make very dependable or trustworthy vehicles anymore—and increasingly, it doesn't seem like they aim to.

Take Chrysler, which merged with PSA and became a part of the new Dutch automotive group Stellantis in 2021.

By 2023, after some bold restructuring on the American side and brands like Jeep and

Dodge, Stellantis produced a record year, turning a $20 billion profit, paying out $7.5 billion to its shareholders, and compensating its CEO with $40 million for the year.

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How American Cars Got So Bad

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