Toyota's woes provide opportunity for U.S. car companies

Toyota's quality issues could not have come at a better time for the Big three U.S. car companies. This article was pretty interesting.
One of the things they mentioned were the "bad carpets". Just my opinion, but I don't think there was ever anything wrong with the carpets, That was Toyota either not knowing or refusing to admit they had mechanical problems with the accelerators, which I'm sure are far more expensive to replace than the carpets. It was not mentioned by the article, but from what I have read elsewhere, the predominant problems seem to be emanating from the Japanese trying to cut costs by using cheap shit parts from third party suppliers in the U.S. and worse, Mexico. Christ, if I wanted transportation from Mexico I would have bought a donkey.

Up till now the U.S. car companies have never been able to compete with the Japanese in the small car market because on one side you had a car like the Corolla, which was known to hit the 200+ K mark, while being an infrequent visitor to the mechanic, while on the U.S. side you had the Pinto, the Gremlin, the Chevette, the Escort - just an endless suck-session of junky cars that not only didn't last long, but saw the mechanic frequently from cradle to grave. This soured (and rightly so) most peoples opinion of American made small cars, and made it almost impossible for Detroit to break into the small car market, for even if they came out with a great small car, who would believe it?

I'd say that now with Toyota's woes, it would be a great time for a U.S. car company to come out with a great, high quality small car that does NOT have a myriad of safety issues or mechanical problems, announced by an aggressive ad campaign. Unfortunately I doubt very much that will happen, the bone head CEO's of the U.S. car companies are far more likely to try introducing some new enormous SUV, even though gas is still expensive and is going up again.