>>"The US automakers' share will continue to shrink - it will only get smaller."
>>"Strange, US automakers have in fact INCREASED their share over the 10 years or so....after all they are the ones who cornered the SUV market early." <<
You're absolutely wrong. The Clinton/Gore years have been terrible for US manufacturers share-wise. In fact, Detroit lost more market share in the last two years than during the entire 1980's!:
AUTOS-U.S. automakers need to rev up creative engines
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DETROIT, Jan 10 (Reuters) - Unlike the 1980s when U.S automakers lost market share here because of lower vehicle quality than Japanese imports, they now need to arrest their slide by revving up their creative engines and building more exciting vehicles, industry executives and observers said.
The Big Three automakers -- General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and German automaker DaimlerChrysler AG's Chrysler unit, the former No. 3 U.S. automaker -- have watched their collective U.S. market share slide from 76.1 percent in 1980 to 65.6 percent last year.
In the last two years alone, the decline has been almost five points as Japanese, South Korean and European automakers have offered more desirable luxury and entry-level cars as well as new light trucks -- pickup trucks, minivans and SUVs, segments long dominated by the U.S. makes.
``Clearly as the Europeans and Japanese enter markets, there's going to be some sharing of those markets that were exclusively domestic before,'' Nissan Motor Co. Ltd.'s senior vice president of U.S. sales and marketing Jed Connelly said at the North American International Auto Show.
The Big Three now hang their hopes for a rebound on more exciting designs to lure back defectors. New models on display this week at the auto show included GM's Pontiac Vibe, the Ford Escape and Chrysler's Jeep Liberty, SUVs combining a car's driving performance with a truck's roominess.
However, for every new car offered by the domestic automakers, there is an import to satisfy the same target buyer. For example, the Vibe, on sale next year, shares parts with the Matrix SUV from Toyota Motor Corp..
``Competition is intensifying,'' J.D. Power and Associates analyst Jeff Schuster said. ``Where there were fewer competitors five years ago, today each segment has many more players.''
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