Why are US automobile companies consistently losing market share?

Why are US automobile companies consistently losing market share?

Terry Tamminen (Author & Environmental Policy Advisor) gives expert video advice on: What are large corporations doing to help fight long term environmental issues? and more...

The US auto companies are really lagging behind in terms of the notion of clean tech and inventing our future, lagging behind the Japanese and Korean automakers and now even the Chinese automakers. There's a lot of reasons for it. A lot of it is seeped in the American business culture, but a lot of it is just in the way that cars are designed. It takes about eight years for Ford or General Motors to take a car from the design all the way to the showroom where they can sell it to you. The Japanese and Korean automakers can do that in as little as thirty months. So once it becomes clear that the price of gasoline is going up, for example, and people want hybrids or fuel efficient cars, the Japanese and the Koreans can turn on a dime so to speak and crank out those kinds of vehicles pretty quickly, where it is many more years before we see the American automakers catching up; they've turned themselves into dinosaurs.