[Hylton]

There are a few issues here - First, the desire for wealth is what has created this loss of the manufacturing sector in North America. Companies are always looking for the cheapest way to bring a product to market. If that means moving manufacturing to Asia, so be it. Oh and it's not coming back either until China and India's salaries are near ours.

Second - quality. Rob is correct when he says that the Big 3 produce some products that are on par or better than the Japanese counterpart but too little, too late. It is very hard to get an individual to try something else when the last car they drove for the last 10 years (Honda or Toyota) was trouble free.

When people say that Japanese parts are so expensive I laugh and say "Go price out a muffler assembly for a GMC Yukon". That used to be one strong point of Big 3 ownership - parts were cheap. Look at all the young kids these days (who typically are broke like all teenagers). What are they driving? Imports.

GM has some fantastic products out there right now (Cobalt, Aura, Vibe, G5, Aveo, Malibu) which are right for the times but the problem is they wouldn't know how to market an ice cream cone on a 100 degree day.