IT IS AS IF the American car industry no longer exists.
Dave Cole, chairman of the Center on Automotive Research, told USA Today that Honda and Toyota are competing "to show who's the greenest and who has the best quality. . . . They both want to get into the position that you don't have to be rich to be green."
Despite gas prices that momentarily dropped, slowing hybrid sales, Toyota and Honda are selling something that is currently impossible to sell out of Detroit.
"People like being green," said Honda's advertising senior manager Tom Peyton in USA Today. He said the company was going after 20-somethings with "happy ads" full of "optimism."
Notice that Honda and Toyota, while shadowing each other's every move to bottle optimism and capture the "green car market segment," are unconcerned about any eco-threat coming out of Detroit. If Detroit has any last gasp left in its creativity, it should take this as an insult and a dare to get noticed. Sure, Ford has a 41-mile-per-gallon Fusion that is competing with Toyota's hybrid Camry, and it has the small SUV hybrid Escape. But the Big Three have laden themselves so much with unsatisfying planet-killer cars that the big news last week was the closing of nearly 1,800 GM and Chrysler dealerships.
The closings were the top story in Wisconsin, my home state where I happened to spend last weekend. GM had already closed a Janesville plant that President Obama campaigned at. Chrysler is closing a Kenosha plant. Car dealership names I grew up with had franchises bite the dust. One Chrysler location being closed in the western town of Ellsworth goes back three generations of family ownership, back to 1919. The car dealership in the town of 3,000 people is a civic fixture, supporting local causes and sports teams.
The current owner, Meghan Quinn-Kummer of Quinn Motors, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "I haven't had a lot of time to process my emotions. But I am not an angry person. I am not going to sit here and berate Chrysler and feel sorry for myself. It's a very difficult time, but in the big scheme of things you just pick up and move along."
It makes you wish Chrysler and GM would pick up and move a lot faster than they have been. Even my dad, a retired auto frame welder and a Buy American car owner, said there were too many dealerships moving too few and mediocre cars. The average Toyota and Honda dealerships sell between 1,200 and 1,300 vehicles a year, compared with 300 for a Chrysler dealer, according to newspaper accounts.
If the market doesn't stabilize, this may only be Phase 1," automotive consultant John Casesa told The New York Times.
The only way to avoid Phase 2 is for Detroit to take a page from Insight and Prius. Not only do GM, Chrysler, and Ford have to trim their fleets, they have to put out a car that has become an icon of optimism instead of arrogance. It is a concept that has not yet emerged in the grim negotiations for federal bailouts.
President Obama should say to the automakers, "Fellas, give us one car, one car that will make Honda and Toyota turn their heads. Give us one car that is green for the environment and puts green in American wallets. Give us one green car that 20-somethings will text-message each other about. Give us one car that will convince Americans - not just the eco-elite in the cities but the uncles and aunts in the Heartland - to get out of SUVs. Give us one car that announces to the rest of the world that America is not just resigned to change, but truly happy to join the green revolution."
Derrick Z. Jackson can be reached at jackson@globe.com. 
