> Well yeah, but why can't they? Why are the Big Three so bad at
> designing cars? I don't get it.
FWIW, about a month ago, I put this question to an industrial engineer who works for a company that produces parts for American and Japanese automakers. He said the culture on the assembly lines in the American automotive plants is totally different from the Japanese automotive plants. The Japanese plants (i.e. those plants run by Toyota, Honda, etc. but not necessarily located in Japan), he said, have carefully choreographed every movement the worker makes. There's nothing extraneous (no extra tools, etc.) -- every move the worker does has been carefully studied and pre-planned.
That sounds a little scary to me, but you can imagine how it would be good for maintaining quality and consistency in your products. The American plants are nothing like this, my engineer friend said -- the work is result-oriented ("make sure this is screwed to that"), the worker has a lot less guidance in terms of how s/he completes the task, and there are apparently a lot of extraneous tools, etc.
Changing these kinds of practices takes a long time, apparently -- it's not as simple as having a CEO say "let's be more like the Japanese" and implementing it all by fiat.
So that was one engineer's perspective. Whether others would share that analysis, I don't know, but it sounds plausible to me.
-WD