[69Tom]

I not saying this to be a smart-a$$ or be facetious, but honestly, do the majority of people really care about cars anymore? I mean, really have a bond with a brand or a love for their car? We're car guys so I think it's easy to think people care as much as we do. I dunno, out of my group of friends in my age range, I'm one of the few people who's really into cars. I'll meet some people who are into BMWs or Porsches, but when it comes to an American brands, it seems like that was killed off somewhere along the last 20 year road into oblivion.

People are claiming, "But the Camaro had 14K pre-orders!!!" Now, this is a good thing and I'm glad there's still some interest, but when you compare this to production totals of the Camaro in its heyday, it's barely skimming the overall production. Now, hopefully, over the production year, they'll get a lot more orders. But I'd actually be surprised to see it break 50K. Hopefully I will be so.

All in all, people seem to only use their cars to get from point A to B. They want one that does so cheaply, with as little effort or work on their part as possible. I sometimes think if a car was invented that washed itself, never needed an oil change, and got good gas mileage, it would immediately become the best selling car in the US, irrespective of how it looked. If you need an example, check the style (if you can call it that) of the Toyota Prius. That is possibly one of the ugliest cars on the road (in fact, do hybrid cars automatically have to be ugly as hell? is that a governmental requirement?)

I come from a GM family--my grandfather worked at the Tonawanda plant building engines--chances are he built my COPO engine, and my other grandfather sold tooling to GM--so I am not stating this from an angle that come from hope the performance car and the US car companies die. It just seems like that's the way things are and will be unless car designs start sparking an interest in people again.

It'll definitely be harder with those fuel requirements and costs. And definitely hard to sway people's sentiment the other way about it.

Feel free to prove me wrong. In fact, I hope I am wrong. It's just the sense I get from people in the younger generations.