This is the kind of thing that really gets to me. Why are some people (in this case, the Big Three car companies and Ford in particular) so short-sighted about things that end up making huge differences in so many lives? Jon Stewart made a joke about this last night, and his basic point was that anyone reasonable would have guessed that the huge SUV boom couldn't last forever. I don't know if that's true, but it's more sad than funny that thousands of American jobs are going to be lost partly because American car companies didn't catch on to the hybrid idea long ago.

Hybrid cars make economic sense. Having better products, by which I mean more efficient products that still do the job they're intended to do but use less to do it, is always a good long-term strategy. Whether not realizing or acting on this was a fault in the Ford management or elsewhere in the company, I have no idea.

My family has always bought American cars (it's a union thing involving my late grandfather). When it came time for me to buy my first car, I assumed I would buy an American car, and I looked carefully at all my options. While not a car expert, I can do consumer research with the best of them, and there were simply no American car companies making cars I was interested in buying. None were hybrids (sorry FEH fans- it's still an SUV, so not on my list) and social responsibility mattered to me more than any other feature. I ended up deciding on the HCH '05, and I haven't regretted it. Still, when I hear news stories like this one, I remember my decision and sigh. If Ford and the other American car companies weren't even able to sell to people like me, predisposed to buy from them, then they really need to rethink their direction. If they had been smart enough to do that a while ago, maybe they wouldn't need to make so many layoffs now, maybe there would be more hybrids on the roads, maybe American cars would be a bigger piece of the market, and maybe our national gas consumption would be lower.