Unless you’ve been living under a rock you know that the current climate in the domestic automaker industry is horrendous. I’ve given some thoughts on how to fix the problem within our borders, but it appears to me that something bigger is going on here. It appears that the consuming public has finally begun to reign in its spending habits.

What does this mean for the automakers? Less inventory moving off of lots and less sales of new and used cars – both of which mean less revenue. As a consumer who is off-again, on-again in the market for a new or newly used car I can tell you that it’s just not worth buying a new car right now (so long as you have other means of conveyance). I spent last month looking around used car dealer lots and I didn’t find one deal. Not ONE decent deal! Sure, I understand that the people who work at these places need to pay the bills and eat, but you would think that in a tough economic time when an entire industry to collapsing there would be some ingenuity at the local or regional levels to cut prices and sell product.

I guess not.

In fact, the price disparities between the new and used cars weren’t even that far apart. In other words, I might as well have purchased a brand new car because I’d only be spending a few thousand more for it and I’d be getting a brand new machine with top of the line features. Oh, that reminds me – the feature packages are too expensive on new cars. Consumers know that you can get a great sound system installed in a car for a few hundred bucks (I said great sound system – not the type of system where you can take your car to a show a win awards). So when you see automakers adding $800 – $1,200 for such an upgrade, why would you purchase that upgrade? Add up a bunch of those large-scale “nickel and dime” pieces and you find yourself wondering why you’d buy a car from that dealer in the first place.

Now add all of this to the fact that American automakers have a reputation for shoddy workmanship while comparatively priced foreign cars have a reputation for lasting forever and American consumers have an easy choice to make. In this case, consumers aren’t even making a proactive choice to buy one car or another – they’re just not going out to purchase new vehicles period. But when they do one has to wonder how long they will continue to buy an overpriced, inferior, and out of date product.