I always considered the big 3 more than very well qualified to build pickup trucks and other huge rear-wheel drive vehicles. Big, sturdy and powerful vehicles.
They never really knew how to build 4-cylinder engines. All their attemps produced big, unefficient, noisy and unreliable powerplants. And their V6 were barely as efficient as the japanese 4 bangers, only they were so heavy that the resulting cars were always unbalanced and bigger in size with less room inside than the competition.
Mergers and associations with the foreign auto industry brought some interesting engineering back home and finally made the final product more appealing and interesting but it is still very Cavalieresque. I was always told that this is the way the Americans liked their cars: more torque than HP, jumpy suspensions, close to no compression on gas release, and bigger ashtrays and cupholders than trunks.
I guess that everything and everyone evolves...
