Theyre Shuttin Detroit Down

AmericanCulturalAssumption: "Detroit" stands for the Canadian and American auto industry, located in Ontario and the American Midwest. For the better part of a century, most Americans were quite proud of this industry. Its achievements, and the eco-system it was part of, include the stuff of legends:

The invention of "MassProduction?"
Ford's "FiveDollarDay?"
The Model T
Cleaning up city streets by relegating horses to bridle trails
"Cheaper by the Dozen"
Al Sloan's "A car for every purse and purpose"
"A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage"
Mechanized agriculture, and the ability to "feed the world"
The Golden Gate Bridge
Planned obsolescence
The sabotage of streetcar systems in dozens of cities (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_Streetcar_Scandal)
The Montgomery Bus Boycott
The Interstate Highway System
The Pan-American Highway
The DeSoto? and the '59 Cadillac
1960s muscle cars
The Corvair -- "Unsafe at any speed"
The Dodge Caravan
The Ford Flex (unveiled at the peak of GW Bush's oil crunch!)

The auto industry is intensely competitive, though they don't always compete by producing high-quality products that consumers need...

In order to thrive, the auto industry invests in new technologies. Some are technologies that computer programmers would do well to emulate:

LeanProduction?
Good user interfaces (many of the "good" examples in TheDesignOfEverydayThings are from automobiles)
BenchMarking
ExtremeProgramming -- the early major XP projects were in finance and the auto industry
Automatomobiles

Discussion:

If the American auto industry is shut down, what do we stand to lose? What are we likely to lose?

The Detroit area may become the next Afghanistan.

Also, maybe it's the first place to make a stand against lopsided trade. Many of us disagree with the claims made by "free trade" proponents. Their models are too simplistic to mirror reality.