If people were really, really excited about Ford cars, people would buy more of them.

I will build a car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one - and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God's great open spaces. - Henry Ford

In a recent speech Walter Reuther told of a visit to the new automatically operated Ford plant in Cleveland. Pointing to the robots, his host asked him, “How are you going to collect union dues from those guys?” The C.I.O. president … returned an equally pertinent question: “And how are you going to get them to buy cars?

After being bombarded endlessly by road-safety propaganda it was almost a relief to find myself in an actual accident.

When you loosen that up, and people can drive small cars everywhere, then people will buy.

Ford can't sell trucks currently, and GM is not selling as many cars as it would like to. That is a problem of product and pricing, not a systemic problem of abandonment by consumers.