Any of you guys read Lee Iacocca's book "Where have all the leaders gone?" It's a fascinating book overall, but there's a good section (may even be a whole chapter) on his time at Chrysler, the time after and his thoughts on the current auto industry.

The main thing that I got from that section and remember today is how he compared the American auto industry to that of Japan. Think about this: How many sedans does GM have? Compare that to Nissan. How many coups does Ford have? Compare that to Toyota. All of these american companies are products of decades of mergers and acquisitions. Each time they kept most of the product line. Chrysler did a REALLY balsy thing by dropping the Plymouth name. But it was really something that needed to be done.

These companies need to trim the fat. They don't have the brand loyalty because their product lines are so thin.

As for the size of our vehicles vs the size of European vehicles. . .it's easy to see how that happened. When I first got my license, gas was 79cents a gallon. Roads in the US are, for the most part, three times the size of roads in European towns. We just have the ROOM for these cars and they were cheap enough to operate when we got hooked on them.

Now we like our big roomy cars and gas is too expensive.

So bailout? Yeah. . .but some restrictions should apply. Get rid of redundant product lines. How much different could a Ford SUV be than its Lincoln and Mercury counterparts?

-James