Advice for American Automakers

Here's what you can do to correct your problems:

Take emergency action to save your jobs and your companies now.

1. Cut your prices to competitive levels. That means Toyota pricing *gasp* or something even better - beat their prices.

2. Roll a Camry into your design engineer's workshop and tell them simply this "If you don't beat this design in one year you are fired"

3. Reduce the size of your vehicles. Make them lighter. Make them easier to handle. We don't want the Tank.

4. Consider hybrid technology as a stopgap solution and work toward the completion of plug in electric technology. Then quickly accelerate to plug in technology. Do not put your hybrid technology in heavy SUVs and Trucks. It's counterproductive unless you intend to make this technology as an option fleet-wide.

5. Consider a little humility in your customer sales department. Perhaps publicly admitting that you have made design mistakes in the past. Do take polls. Stop listening to your own propaganda. Build cars that people need. People need fuel efficient, highly reliable, maintenance free vehicles. They would also like them to be safe and they would like them to be comfortable and fun to drive.

6. Please, Please, PLEASE stop building ugly cars!!!! The crossover phenomenon has created a bastardization between a truck and a car, and it is hideous.

7. Please stop trying to make retro cars that look like a '67 Volvo. They look stupid.

8. Work with labor in good faith to empower the worker. Perhaps stock sharing, or a company worker/ownership plan so that the worker feels an investment in the company. If you do these things that the Japanese have already been doing, you just might survive.

9. Consider firing anybody that says "We just can't do it". You don't have the time or money to tolerate naysayers at any level of management, and your jobs and the integrity of the American Auto industry is on the line.

10. In your dealerships, make sure that you really serve your customers, and that you meet or exceed their expectations. Eventually Customer loyalty will return.

11. Drop the pandering to the special interest groups. You are an American companies, not political action committees.