In 1979, despite Chrysler's flirtation with bankruptcy and a sea of red ink throughout the auto industry, it was still possible to refer to General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler as "The Big Three" without irony. Although imported cars surged to a record 21.8% market share in 1979, GM still controlled nearly half the market. Even ailing Chrysler, whose market share had slumped to 10.1%, controlled as much of the U.S. market as Toyota, Honda, and Volkswagen combined.

Thirty years later, things have changed. As of November 2008, GM's market share has fallen to 20.4%, Ford's to 15.8%, and Chrysler's to 11.4%. If we count only cars, not trucks, the numbers are far worse than that: 7.8% for GM, 5.0% for Ford, and a mere 2.7% for Chrysler. By comparison, Toyota's share of new car sales for 2008 (year-to-date) is 10.4%, more than Ford and Chrysler combined.

FOLLOW THE FLEET

The picture becomes even worse if we break out fleet sales. Detroit has become very reliant on sales to commercial customers like rental car companies and government agencies. They're an easy way to boost volume, making up for slow spots in retail sales. Most automakers sell to fleets, but fleet sales represent a much larger percentage of Detroit's total sales mix than they do for most non-U.S. automakers. In the first half of 2008, for example, 38.7% of all Chevrolet Cobalts, 49.9% of all Chevy Impalas, 62.2% of all Chrysler Sebrings, and 59.9% of all Lincoln Town Cars went to fleets. By comparison, only 1.9% of Honda Civics, 8.6% of Toyota Camrys, and 10.7% of Infiniti G35s were fleet sales. (The only import manufacturer whose dependence on fleet sales approaches Detroit's is Kia.) At the beginning of 2008, each of the Big Three insisted that they would limit their reliance on fleet sales, but as they saw the dismal sales returns of this spring and summer, they were forced to change their tune.

What's wrong with fleet sales? A sale is a sale, right? Well, for one, fleet sales are heavily discounted, which means that the manufacturer (and dealers) make less money on each car sold. More seriously, an abundance of fleet sales is poisonous to resale values. Most fleet operators keep their cars for no more than three years, and then sell them for whatever the market will bear. As a result, a few years of heavy fleet sales creates a glut of late-model used cars, driving down prices. (For the most extreme example, one need only look at the UK market, where the prevalence of short-term, company-funded leases means that new vehicles can lose as much as 70% of their value in only three years.) It's hard to persuade new-car buyers to pay anything resembling full price for, say, a new Chrysler 300, when they can pick up a two-year-old ex-fleet car for half the money or less. Furthermore, since lease costs are based on residual values, pushing down resale prices makes leasing more expensive.

CREDIT? WHAT CREDIT?

Fleet or retail, it would be fair to say that Detroit has great difficulty selling its cars at anything close to their manufacturer's suggested retail prices. This year, Detroit automakers have spent around $3,500 on incentives for each vehicle sold. By comparison, the Japanese companies have been averaging around $1,500 per vehicle, the Europeans $2,800. It should be no surprise, then, that the average transaction price for most Detroit cars is lower than that of their Japanese rivals. Average transaction price for the Toyota Corolla, for example, is nearly $3,000 higher than that of the Chevy Cobalt and almost $2,000 more than the Ford Focus.

Then we come to the credit problem. Among Detroit's leading strategies for maintaining what retail sales volume they do have have been generous credit terms, like 0% financing, cheap leases, and a laissez-faire attitude towards buyers' credit ratings. Putting it bluntly, many of their sales were to people who couldn't really afford the cars they were buying.

The consumer credit collapse has not only made car loans harder to come by and lease deals nearly extinct, it has cost the automakers a great deal of money. The major automakers went into the financing business years ago because credit arms like GMAC (which, we should note, is now split 49/51 between GM and Cerberus, Chrysler's parent company) were an easy way to make money -- low overhead, modest risk, high returns. Modest risk, that is, until they started writing a lot of dubious loans. If someone defaults on a car loan, the lienholder's best-case scenario is to repossess the vehicle and sell it at auction. One of the reasons people default on car loans, however, is that they've ended up "upside down" on their note, owing more than the car is worth. If the lienholder repossesses the vehicle, that negative equity becomes part of their balance sheet instead. (Did we mention the plunging resale values?) A few years ago, GM and Ford made about a third of their revenues from their credit arms. This year, Ford Motor Credit's investor statements show a pretax loss of almost $2.2 billion for the first nine months of 2008, and other financing entities aren't doing any better.

THE COSTS OF DOING BUSINESS

The upshot is that Detroit sells far fewer cars at far lower prices than most non-U.S. automakers, and their financing cash cow has become a gaping wound. On top of that, Detroit faces higher overhead costs than the "transplants" (overseas automakers with factories in the U.S.), which is a prescription for big operating losses.

Labor costs are part of the problem. Contrary to popular rumor, the disparity in wages and benefit costs between Detroit and the transplants is relatively modest -- around 10% -- but that's for current employees, which doesn't include Detroit's significant "legacy costs." Detroit automakers have also been paying out health and pension benefits to around 550,000 retirees and their surviving spouses; that compares with only 180,000 current union employees. Last year's UAW agreements called for the bulk of those obligations to be transferred into a union-administered VEBA (voluntary employee benefits association), which reduces the automakers' costs to some extent, but doesn't eliminate them.

Another factor, at least for GM and Ford, is an array of redundant brands. Ford has fewer, having sold off Aston Martin, Jaguar, and Land Rover (with Volvo likely to follow), but Lincoln-Mercury remains, and its morbidity is readily apparent. GM, meanwhile, has eight divisions, the distinctions between which are barely understood by GM's own marketing people, let alone the public. Most of these redundant brands sell hair-split variations on the same products, at very similar prices. From a business standpoint, there is very little reason for them to continue, but the cost of shuttering a division is high. When GM shut down Oldsmobile in 2004, it cost them some $2 billion to settle their franchise agreements, and it's unlikely that shutting down other divisions would be any cheaper. (They could sell one or more divisions instead, but the question of who's going to buy them at this point is another matter entirely.) As long as the divisions exist, though, they will continue to drive up marketing, advertising, engineering, and administrative costs, to no particularly good end.

These things were problems even when the economy looked healthier, but this year, with auto sales down more than 30% from 2007, they've become crippling. Each of the Detroit automakers is burning money at a ferocious rate, GM and Ford to the tune of about a billion dollars a month. They've mortgaged or sold almost everything not nailed down, and they've borrowed so much money that their credit ratings have been reduced to a level slightly below many junk bonds. Overseas sales, which for a while looked like their salvation, have turned nearly as gloomy as ours have. In Spain, for example, new-car sales recently dropped by almost 50%.

GOOD MONEY AFTER BAD

So, now Detroit's leader come, as Iacocca did before them, to Washington, where they hope to find someone still willing to loan them money. As the old saying goes, if you look around the poker table and you can't figure out who the sucker is, you're it...

Forty years ago, Car and Driver editor Brock Yates coined the term "Gross Pointe Myopians" for the leadership of the Detroit automakers. He accused them of living in an insular bubble, so far removed from the real world that they remained convinced that they were doing the right thing even as they sailed their ship merrily into the iceberg. The embarrassing spectacle of Big Three chairmen Rick Wagoner, Alan Mulally, and Bob Nardelli -- whose combined cash compensation is well over $50 million -- flying their corporate jets to Washington to plead destitution suggests that Detroit's vision remains astigmatic.

Wagoner, Mulally, and Nardelli, however, are only the latest inheritors of what we see as a deeply unhealthy corporate culture. Any leader, in business or elsewhere, makes mistakes. Any company at least occasionally stumbles, or wanders off in the wrong direction, particularly in an industry where major decisions have to be made so many years in advance. But to keep making the same mistakes for more than three decades suggests a deeper problem, a system that breeds shortsighted decisions and perpetual malaise.

The pattern is as simple as it is familiar: after publicly and vociferously resisting any change in their approach to doing business (particularly safety, emissions, or fuel economy mandates), a Detroit automaker launches the exciting new product that will single-handedly put them back on the map, restore Detroit's honor, and bring customers rushing back into showrooms. When the product appears, it is often deeply flawed, showing the effects of ill-considered economizing or a simple lack of will, as if someone had stopped the development process at 80% and declared it good enough. Even if the product is truly competitive when it's introduced, it is subsequently left to languish while its maker goes on to the next Next Big Thing; the Ford Taurus is an excellent example. Before long, it becomes necessary for the manufacturer to turn to big incentives, easy credit, and heavy fleet sales to maintain any semblance of sales volume. Customers not already embittered by quality-control and reliability issues soon come to see the product (and the brand that sells it) as the automotive equivalent of store-brand macaroni and cheese -- not very appetizing unless you don't have the money or the time for anything better.

It's not that Detroit's engineers or designers are less skilled or less dedicated than their counterparts at the transplants or foreign makes. It's not even that anyone involved is happy about building disappointing token efforts. The problem is that the culture of these corporations is based on disconnected fiefdoms that compete with each other when they should cooperate, where managers cut each other's throats to improve their own performance statistics, and where no one involved is in any position to take a holistic view of the finished product -- or its effects on the experience or perception of the customer. It's a culture where the leadership is rewarded (and, frankly, rewarded obscenely) for quarterly profits and stock prices, even as they undermine their companies' futures. When GM chairman Rick Wagoner gets a raise after incurring losses that resemble the gross national product of some third-world countries, it is evident that Detroit provides its leaders with little incentive for looking at the big picture.

In richer years, the Detroit automakers could shrug off these problems. After all, when your company controls half the domestic market, it's hard to worry too much about niggling organizational problems, like divisions that compete with each other more than their external competition. Now, they're feeling the burn.

BAILOUT, BAILOUT, WHO GETS A BAILOUT

So, what's to be done about it? The proposed federal bailout has engendered strong feelings on all sides. As many defenders and apologists as Detroit has, there are a lot of people who bear GM, Ford, and Chrysler a good deal of ill will. Say what you will about pension costs, credit problems, or unexpected surges in oil prices -- the fact remains that Detroit has lost market share primarily by relentlessly squandering the goodwill of their customers.

The author believes that these pro- or anti-Detroit sentiments are beside the point. So too is the question of whether Detroit is worth saving. Almost no one would debate that the collapse of even one of the "Big Three" would be disastrous for a huge swath of an already-recessed economy.

The real issue is not whether Detroit is worth saving, but whether it can be saved. Emergency room doctors and army medics are all too familiar with the concept of triage -- a grim calculus that applies the greatest energy to those patients who can still be helped. Heartless as it may sound, there is little to be gained by pumping transfusion after transfusion into a patient who's hemorrhaging uncontrollably.

Viewed in that light, the prognosis for Detroit is poor. As we mentioned earlier, the automakers' credit rating is close to rock bottom. We, the public, are asked to invest billions where wiser investors fear to tread. Some idealists imagine that a quick reorganization and the implementation of smarter leadership could result in leaner, stronger companies, repaying any investment with dividends. On the other hand, Cerberus -- one of the country's wealthiest private investment firms -- thought the same thing when they bought Chrysler last year, and now they, too, stand with hands out, begging for help.

It is difficult to envision GM recovering without Chapter 11 or similar legal protection. Even if they declared Chapter 11, it would likely take years for a viable post-bankruptcy entity to emerge from the rubble. There is also little evidence that GM's current leadership (who refuse to step aside, even if it would get them federal aid) would be willing or able to make the profound cultural changes that would be required to address the malignancy. Ford's Alan Mulally -- who performed a similar revival at Boeing -- seems more capable of such a feat, although Ford's survival would still depend on an economic upswing that may not be coming any time soon. As for Chrysler, it suffers the least-competitive product line in the industry, and more competitive new products would be years away, even if Bob Nardelli had not sharply cut their development and engineering staff as part of an ill-fated strip-and-flip plan. The best Chrysler can likely achieve is a few more meager years selling repackaged Nissans, with any federal money being absorbed by Cerberus to compensate it for its failed investment. The Jeep brand may survive, perhaps being sold off, but the rest of Chrysler looks to have a "do not resuscitate" stamp on its chart.

The question we must ask of any bailout is what its real goals would be. If it's to save American industry, it must be remembered that Detroit's plans revolve heavily around their business overseas, and we may not be pleased with how much of any bailout money is spent within our borders. If the goal is to save jobs, we have to reconcile that with the fact that Detroit will lay off as many employees as they can get away with (Chrysler's recovery, recall, involved the loss of fully half their workforce). If we're hoping that an infusion of federal money will result in a shift to more fuel-efficient cars (which was the original, improbable pretense of the bailout), we must acknowledge that Detroit's immediate future will still revolve heavily around trucks and SUVs. As for jobs, if the federal government wanted its investment to pay off in job creation (or at least a reduction in job losses), it might be better off putting money into the transplants, whose prospects are far rosier. Again, this is not a matter of patriotism or spite -- simply the strong likelihood that the $34 billion Detroit wants would vanish with nothing to show for it, and that they their leaders would just be back again next year, asking for more. How much do we really want to pay to delay the inevitable?

If federal money is to be invested in the auto industry, the author would rather see it go to the relief of the many thousands of people who have and will lose their jobs, even if the automakers get their money. A G.I. Bill-style fund for retraining and continuing education for laid-off autoworkers, perhaps; or tax credits and mortgage relief for people who've lost their jobs, rather than the companies that laid them off. A program of subsidized loans or incentives for people starting new businesses -- or for companies that add jobs, rather than eliminating them -- seems a far better investment than the Detroit automakers. It has become unfashionable to express concern about the human costs of business, but they can no longer be ignored.

To abuse another metaphor, there sometimes comes a time in fighting a structure fire when you realize that a building is going to fall, even if you quench the flames. At that point, all you can do is evacuate everyone you can and start looking for ways to contain the damage from its collapse.

As of this writing, it appears that Congress and the White House have hammered out a compromise to let Detroit get its money, on the grounds that the Big Three are "too big to fail." We fear that Detroit will prove that dictum wrong, and that when they do, we will all be left holding the bag.

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