[Jim Sims]

"Simply making cars lighter would provide all of the benefits with increased reliability and less cost."

Easy to say, hard to do. The reason aircraft and spacecraft are expensive is the cost of designing and making them light and reliable.

There are a lot of small, incremental changes in design that appear to be "gimmicks" but a 1/2 percent here and 2 per cent there, etc. changes do add up.

The American car industry was financially (and in some technical areas) so far ahead of it's competitors in the 1950's and they wasted away all their advantage in the past 60 years. GM, Chrysler and probably Ford too now deserve to fold; it's time their obsolete corporate cultures go extinct.