Yes.
The small car market where Ford made their big bet is soft. They're still going to keep building the Focus in Mexico.
Here's where it gets interesting- the move to larger cars is putting the carmakers in a bind with the looming fleet economy standards so they're having to leapfrog to electrics*/hybrids to have a shot of meeting it.
Where Trump and his Big Oil government could really rat %^&* the auto industry is by changing those regs for another about face. Or if they're going to do it they need to do it fast.
In the last big oil downturn, Reagan "saved" the US car companies with the SUV exclusion. So I guess maybe we really could go back to the 60s and promote growth by happily burning as much oil as possible.
The hole in the bucket on that one is that the high EROEI oil that fueled that is mostly all gone but we'll pretend it is the same at least long enough for the billionaires and corporations to ransack the rest of the economy.
That's how it works in end stage capitalism.
*pure electrics are really simple machines- they sorta spell the end of the auto industry anyway because once you scale 'em there's not enough complexity there to extract much profit out. And then there's the implications of autonomous vehicles where you end up needing about half as many.
Once again the biggest enemy is technology and it is moving way, way, way faster than political and economic thought is. Voting to go back to the 50s isn't helpful either.
