Crossing the Energy Divide: Moving from Fossil Fuel Dependence to a Clean-Energy Future

7. Vehicles: The End of the Affair

As the economic crisis rapidly escalated in 2008, commentators raised a question that would have been unthinkable a few years earlier: whether the “Big Three” American automobile manufacturers deserved to survive. The chief executive officers of General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler had all come to Washington to plead for a government bailout, and Congress was in a truculent mood. It was hard to believe that the auto companies wouldn’t get some kind of help, because so many businesses and jobs depended on them. But first the politicians and public were going to vent. Why had the American manufacturers taken so long to wake up to the realization that this was a different world than that of the 1950s or 1960s, when ...