PREFATORY NOTE BY PATRICE GREANVILLE

The Downfall of the American Car
As almost everyone awake knows by now, US auto brands have been on the skids for generations. After a long period of fame and admiration that started by the turn of the 20th century for making cars that were robust, well made, technologically efficient and above all affordable, the cheering began to dry up by the late 1950s, when Detroit was shown to be making dangerously shoddy, ecologically deaf and obsolescent cars on purpose. This turning point, epitomised by Ralph Nader's exposés, which also launched a new era of better-informed consumerism, coincided with the aggressive entry of European and soon after Asian imports, makes that gradually but inexorably demonstrated that many foreign cars were not just cheaper but far better designed, in fact, designed to last. This was sheer sacrilege to Detroit's Big Three philosophy of endless "junking of cars" every 3 years, a ritual that had become enshrined in most American families consciousness since the end of WW2, as the nation had embarked on its legendary, historically unprecedented,  middle class expansion.

The situation was counterintuitive. Why would a nation at the top of its international game, in fact the world's uncontested superpower, financially able to command the highest levels of consumer technology and the best and most abundant natural inputs, not to mention probably one of the mos capable labor forces in history, suddenly begin to turn out inferior cars? After all, the consumer revolution in "durables" had been detonated by Henry Ford in the 1910's by the mass manufacturing of cars that were known for their dependability bordering on indestructibility.

Obviously, the problem was not one of production, a lack of know-how, but what some business magazines and particularly astute sociologists were already alerting us about, a profound shift in business philosophy. The US was quickly spawning an increasingly deformed, indeed corrupt, "peculiar American executive culture", where bottom-line thinking, boardroom and Wall Street pressures, and frenzied career advancement where greed came first, second and last, was pushing consumer values to the bottom and total irrelevance. For all intents and purposes, the top American executive, by any standard already grotesquely overcompensated, accustomed to no real challenges from abroad, and enjoying in most cases monopolistic power at home, was swimming in hubris and self complacency, the road to competitive disaster.

This fact was easily perceived in the then leading manufacturing industries, from steel to autos. The supremacy of "financiation of capital" had been long predicted by those who understand capitalism's inexorable laws, but the myopia exhibited by most of the manufacturing industries leaders accelerated their demise from the summit of the American economy.

Subterfuge replaces honest design
At the showroom level, the downfall was therefore largely self-inflicted, product of cynicism, typical capitalist short-term thinking, and out of control careerism exacerbated by the rise of finance as the dominant factor in all economic decisions.  Greed is Good was the executive mantra, now openly and loudly proclaimed, and Detroit's Big Three showed their belief in this dogma by cranking out ecologically insane vehicles—gas guzzlers— that were more and more boats or living rooms on wheels, wrapped in flash and glitter, and even childish, non-functional touches like audacious fins suggestive of interplanetary voyage. (Ironically, the fin had been first implanted on cars in the 1920s by European designers like Paul Jaray, a onetime aircraft designer, who worked chiefly for German makes (Mercedes, Audi), with the object of giving  the cars a more stable, streamlined profile.)

As is by now the rule in all areas of American ruling class practice,  Detroit sought to hide its shabby self-seeking embodied in obsessive cost-cutting and built-in obsolescence at consumer expense by ever more lavish infusions of advertising and public relations, modern marketing being the truest and most organically natural and undeniable child of modern capitalism. Not surprising that this inherently unstable structure would eventually come tumbling down, with the first oil crises of the 1970s providing the decisive push to seal the fate of the once great American car brands as the indisputable world leaders in their field.  In replicating or simply mirroring the fantasy of voter sovereignty that continues to sustain the myth of American democracy, in the industry's haughty disregard for the needs and desires of the car buyers, and in their uber reliance on public manipulation to stay afloat, the American car makers have proved they are and remain part and parcel of an utterly degenerate system, one which, judging by the competition's own products, cannot even be explained entirely by the dynamics of regular capitalism.

Below, Robert Maybeth, Seth Flannigan, Chris Everett, all US residents and personal observers of this phenomenon, plus other commenters, share their honest impressions with fellow Quora readers.  My sincere thanks to them all.

— PG