The alternatives are impractical due to all the space cars and their infrastructure consume (walking, transit), or due to the danger cars pose (bicycles, motorbikes, small cars).
The US has converged because we are trapped in a vicious cycle.
Obviously it's not instantaneous, and you still have imports wanting to fill the vacuum, but a collapse of the US auto industry means 1) lower replacement rate in the near term as the remainders try to ramp up production, 2) difficulty servicing the legacy fleet, and 3) a massive blow in terms of sentiment and outlook. In this hypothetical, an American institution blew itself up and made a lot of people's lives more difficult. Do you think they earn that trust back easily? Or is it a post-bust clarity moment, where people finally have a moment to think about how much money is poured into their personal cars and auto infrastructure writ large?
Because, I mean, we did see something similar to that with the pandemic and a mass shift in perspectives on work culture, which corporations had to fight mightily to hobble. You also saw a similar shift during the Great Depression, and it took banks literal generations to rebuild their reputation with the public. In both cases, you saw massive ramifications for the way in which people lived.
I do think that no auto bailouts in 2008 ends America's love affair with the car as we knew it. So, yes, fewer cars. Or maybe, at least, different cars.
I already addressed that. It takes time to ramp up production. In the meantime, Americans would have wanted action on the part of their political reps. The obvious out for those reps would have been expanded mass transit, as production costs and timing for a bus or train are going to be more advantageous than the amount required to put the equivalent number of people in cars.
If you want to pass judgment, please try to understand the argument first.
It seems extremely presumptive to think the thousands of jurisdictions across the US would somehow bid out, contract, receive, and begin operating fleets before Toyota et al simply scaled up or redirected shipments.
The much more specialized, lower scale, less adaptive manufacturers of public transit vehicles would face an even more severe form of the same problem Toyota would have, except they'd encounter it after years of normal procurement slowness.
That seems very unlikely to me. I think these car companies would all have been purchased for pennies on the dollar, likely by foreign companies in part, and would be making just as many cars today.
It depends. Part of the calculus for the original bailout was the homeland security aspect of potentially turning over companies and the market to foreign competitors, which doesn't go away just because the federal government misses its window to save GM et al. I don't know that such a purchase is a quick process. Either way, it's disruptive to production.
The US has converged because we are trapped in a vicious cycle.