It’s a fundamental and inevitable outcome of how these businesses are structured and run. Were the decisions to chase larger more premium vehicles short sighted? absolutely. Was the pursuit of Financialization in car sales to make up for pricing out lower income buyers obviously a bad idea? Without a doubt. Could they have made any other decisions? Not without being replaced by shareholders.

The solution to this problem is not just to “kick the bums out”, these companies need to have their management and ownership restructured in a way that generates incentive structures to maintaining a stable long term market rather than quarterly revenue growth.