I'm with Dathi and TheMann on this
My thoughts on Detroit's decline- distilled from several other sources, believe me, echo what's been said before:
Detroit was a boomtown grossly dependent on the auto industry enjoying a massive boom during WWII when most of its possible competitors got wiped out and took until the 1960's to recover in quantity and thanks to Deming's work in Japan, quality.
Since nowhere else had the abundance of resources at hand or assured access of deliver whatever as the USA, it was recipe for complacency because Detroit built to suit the US market, and if anyone else wanted some, we'd make it happen, but that wasn't the bread-and butter of the business.
Long story shorter, if the US automakers focused on exporting to a wider market, they wouldn't have been caight napping as badly.
When American tastes shifted away from what the Big Three wanted to make, it was disastrous.
Detroit also had the same problems many Midwestern cities had- St. Louis had this problem as well where where their population started declining in the 1950's due to suburbanization.
The Midwestern cities were left with a lot of dilapidated housing stock that got worn to peices by a horde of migrant workers during WWII surrounded by cheap farmland it was easy to buy and develop into Levittowns that had no real relationship with the central city.
Suburbs promised space, everything up-to-date, and tranquiility, not the dirty urban hustle plus business-friendly zoning boards.
After WWII, people were tired of the intrusive govermental presence ostensibly for the greater good. Suburbs promised it'd be on a scale they could affect in their favor.
Part of that's a failure of urban planning and part of it's just folks pursuing opportunities to suit their interests. Also the attempts to desegregate urban neighborhoods prompted a lot of whites to go to the suburbs. By the 1960's blacks were economically and socially marooned in ghettoes.
The Big Three shot themsleves in the foot in a myriad ways. IMO between planned obsolescence taking hold in the 1960's meaning you didn't build cars to last when you planned for folks to be buying new every 3-5 years and
not having much of a coordinated reponse to the oil shocks of the 1970's,
it gave the Japanese and Europeans plenty of opportunities to penetrate the market with cheaper and arguably better cars.
GM became an object case in top-heavy management which meant ideas had a lot of stops before they reached the executive suite. The SATURN experiment was a demo of GM-doing-better that should have been company-wide but wound up being perceived by management, dealer network, and customer base as a toy train instead of the wave of the future.
So, what to do?
Deming's ideas of statistical analysis led to kaizen in Japan, continuously analyzing reject rates and getting management and labor working together to improve results.
That happened here twenty years late and really didn't shake up the industry enough IMO to quit building comfy, semi-luxe tanks for near-retirees, sports cars and SUVs.
As mentioned before, they were totally tone-deaf to dealer preferences as to what sold and what didn't. Listening to their feedback would've helepd a lot of folks stay in business.
The Big Three getting the message in the 1970's about quality of products, adapting newly-developed and foreign concepts to the American market, and right-sizing cars to suit the new economic conditions would've been nice.
I'm also with Dathi re: diversifying and building buses, rolling stock, locomotives, etc for mass transit as well would be a great idea.
WI they also got into making components for RO/RO freighters too?
Anyhow, it just seems there were multiple opportunities to do better.
BW's idea of corporate raiders "right-sizing" the Big Three would've been an unmitigated disaster. .
You might see 1/5-1/8 of folks making parts for foreign manufacturers or just making boutique cars, but the Big three would've been butchered and left to rot.
Detroit would make the set of
Robocop look like utopia by comparison.