How long was oil at $140.00 ? a year? maybe a bit more?
That factor may have played a very small factor in what destroyed a 75 year old industry. But, a large part, I would disagree.
The auto industry, in the USA, has been destroyed due to poor management and their inability to react to or predict market trends.
BTW, why did high oil prices only destroy the US auto industry and not that of Europe or Japan?
The US auto industry had a bad business model of not fully funding the retirement pay and benefits of the workers. As production volumes shrank, the overhead killed them. That and a severe worldwide industry overcapacity with the big 3 being the high cost producers. And a history of poor design quality evidenced by relatively poor durability of many of their vehicles.
Mass trasnit.
And, I would say it did have a terribly corrosive effect on the European economy. I don't know enough about the Asian or Japanese economies to comment. But, as someone with many Italian relatives, I can promise you that the truckers were dying (and striking) because of the effects of the oil and subsequent petrol rises.
The U.S. had cheap gas prices. The European prices have always been jacked up by huge taxes. The frugal use of gasoline was already factored into the European market. It was forced on the U.S. market. The knee jerk reaction was to stop buying the most popular, most profitable products from Detroit to avoid the high gas consumption inherent in the pickup and SUV models. Detroit was hammered by their own crappy products in the more fuel efficient classes. Car sales plummeted while the bills for exorbitant union labor and benefits remained. The economic death of the U.S. auto companies was unavoidable with the asinine energy policies of the environmentalist/socialist/Democrats in play.