When the bosses of the struggling U.S. car firms General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler went cap-in-hand to the U.S. Congress by corporate jet, sympathy was in short supply. Lawmakers sent them packing.
A month later, the chastened executives returned to Washington D.C. in hybrid cars, offering billions of investment in fuel-efficiency, hybrids, and electric vehicles in return for a bailout. They also promised to sell the offending jets.
The humbling of the Detroit Big Three crystallized a shift: away from powerful, wasteful, and dirty vehicles dependent on cheap oil towards smaller, more fuel–efficient vehicles that run on a variety of cleaner fuels. U.S. manufacturers had resisted fuel-efficiency standards for years. When the credit crunch and soaring gasoline prices struck, they had no Plan B.
American carmakers did not suffer alone. Manufacturers around the world lost money, cut jobs, mothballed factories, and lobbied governments for help as consumers and companies stopped buying new cars.
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