For a long time the primary focus of American car makers has been financial services. Cars have been a vehicle (sorry) to get people into a payment schedule or a lease stream. Lease or purchase financing has been the main focus, not cars. They make their money primarily in finance charges, not in automobile gross margins over costs of production.
The market for alternative energy autos driven (sorry) by price, performance, quality, reliability, etc. — all the factors that people consider in acquiring a car — will determine the economic incentives for manufactures to build those vehicles. A bailout will not, cannot, provide those incentives.
There may be a good case to bail out American car makers, but the reasonable expectation that such a bailout will produce a positive evolution in American automobile products is not part of it.
