200 million automobiles in the United States. If we assume that half of those vehicles are manufactured by the Big Three, that means 100 million American made cars on the road. If those cars are worth on the average, $10,000, that means the total value of American cars is somewhere around $10 trillion dollars.
If the Big Three fail, who is going to service American cars? Not Toyota, not Mercedes Benz. Will Sears understand the codes that show up on your cars computer when something needs to be fixed? Not likely. In my opinion, GM, Ford and Chrysler vehicles will automatically depreciate at least 20% should there be no U.S. auto dealer service available. Without dealer service, that would be a $2 trillion loss in value to American taxpayers, in terms of the automobile fleet. (Now my arithmetic might be flawed, but that no one else is even asking this question is the true flaw.)
With all of the posturing amongst the Republicans, no one has asked this hard question: If the Big Three go away, where are you going to get your car serviced? The loss of Detroit is not just the loss of jobs, it is a huge damage to the American economy. Eventually, half of our cars won’t run. Of course if you are voting to bring jobs to Kentucky, maybe that just means we will just have to buy more Japanese cars to replace those U.S. cars that we can’t fix.