I agree with most of what leftwing said, I believe that GM and Chrysler in paticular have been poorly run for a long time now and put all their eggs in the truck/SUV market and when gas prices skyrocketed and the economy tanked everyone I knew was running out to sell their big gas guzzlers and buying small cars, primarily Hondas and Toyotas (Whether or not it actually made financial sense). A good friend of mine sold his Dodge Dakota for a Honda Fit, and this man is a die-hard Mopar fan!

It was everyones fault, and it was no ones fault. You can’t find one single person or group to take all the blame, and I certainly wouldn’t single out the average Joe on the assembly line.

as an alternative hypothesis, i focus on mismanagement of the auto manufacturers that left them vulnerable to a sharp decline in sales across the board (and a very focused decline on SUVs), due to the epic collapse of the housing market brought about by speculative investment vehicles…ultimately at fault, the repeal of glass-steagal in 1999, under Clinton’s watch, by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and a push toward deregulation pioneered by Reagan…banks, it has been proven, can not regulate themselves…

the housing bubble allowed people to take out bigger and bigger home equity loans based on the fictional value of their homes, and many of those loans were used to buy cars…expensive high-profit SUVs, and as the SUV market tanked as the bubble burst, the mismanaged auto manufacturers who had bet way too strongly on those vehicles ended up getting gut-punched…

blaming the EPA i think is ridiculous, but i agree union contracts were a huge burden that grew relatively uncontrolled…between the union contracts and legacy costs, these companies couldn’t survive the impact of the housing bubble on the auto market…you can’t talk about the failure of the auto companies without factoring the housing crisis, the two are very much related…