In Australia, I owned a Ford (Australian built) for 10 years, and loved it. Then I sold it and bought a new Mitsubishi Lancer early this year.

And I fucking HATE it. I hate almost everything about it. If you're saying Mitsubishi has good build quality, you're having a laugh. Have you seen the quality of the boot linings? The cheap nasty plastic in the dash? The gearbox which feels like it's straight from a piece of farm machinery?

The thing with this bailout is it's not really anything to do with making crap cars. ALL manufacturers sales are down. Honda's are down nearly 40%, the French government has to bail out Renault (which make very economical, quite good cars and sell them globally), Mitsubishi have left the Australian manufacturing sector (they used to make loads of cars here) etc.

The real problem is your unions. During the 60s and 70s, they managed to secure ridiculous agreements such as the manufacturers (GM, Ford etc) paying their pension for as long as they live after they leave the company. This works out to something like $3,000 USD on the price of every single car sold just to fund it.

So while Toyota is locally made in Alabama, they already have the benefit of being able to sell their cars $3,000 cheaper, thus competing directly against the American manufacturers on locally made cars in the local market and still being able to kill them on price. The only way they can make up for that is -- you guessed it -- lower the quality to compete on price.

This also means that when sales drop off, they still have to pay off these 40 year old agreements, so need even more money to do so. If their lobbyists were actually any good they'd have stopped that years ago