"They must adjust, compensate, "reinvent themselves" or die"
They Adjusted - by selling SUV's at a premium and losing money on just about everything else
They Compensated - by creating financing arms to help move their inventory - becoming finance companies that were actually profitable
.....now for the reinventing. You forgot one other possibility.....a Ford/GM merger That would help their cost structure, especially in light of the reduced need for their vehicles.
It's interesting though - GM/Ford kind of parallel the path of Lucent in 2001 -- raise capital to lend to increasingly marginal customers (who can't qualify for the money themselves) to drive the sales of your product - and lock in recurring service revenues. When people got 0% interest, they didn't really care how much the SUV cost. Now that they can't afford to operate the SUV, can't sell it, or dispose of it otherwise, I wonder if GM/Ford credit arms will have a big spike in repos....