Detroit's Big Three, General Motors (NYSE: GM), Ford (NYSE: F) and Chrysler have often been criticized for their bureaucracy, slow decision making, and, at times, outright inertia...even when conditions required bold, decisive action.

There's the joke about the five General Motors executives that go on a camping trip in the Great Midwest. Suddenly, they spot a bear 600 feet away and charging toward where they're seated at the camp site.

Each executive has a rifle and is ready to shoot the bear to defend the campers, and the senior executive says: "Allright, Executives, ready, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim..."

With United Auto Workers union leaders having endorsed a new agreement, and the company also announcing it had agreed to pay $15.4 billion to create a health-care fund with the UAW, it's appropriate to evaluate Ford's (NYSE: F) progress and prospects.

One has to view the (tentative) contract agreement, and any fully-ratified deal, as a positive data point. Among other contract features, if ratified the agreement would enable Ford to hire up to 20% of its work force under a lower-tier wage structure that would substantially reduce its hourly wage structure, Reuters reported Monday, in exchange for Ford's sparing from closure six plants it had planned to close. In short, if ratified, Ford will have made considerable progress in three key areas: labor costs per hour, work rules, and health insurance cost containment. Ford's shares closed Monday down 28 cents to $8.67.

If the term holistic can be applied to automotive design, the concept car just brought to debut by Hyundai Motors Co. (Other OTC:HYMLF) in concert with General Electric Company's (NYSE:GE) GE Plastics would surely fit that description. The Hyundai QarmaQ concept is pushing the envelope in crossover utility vehicle design and construction. By the utilization of a high content of recycled plastics, derived mostly from discarded soft drink bottles, and some 29 other design, construction and material innovations, the QarmaQ boasts a weight reduction of 130 lbs as compared to vehicles of similar size and class. The designers claim that this results in a reduction in fuel usage equal to about one and a half SUV fuel tanks per vehicle per year. Granted, that may not seem like much when viewed on an individual vehicle basis, but multiply it by the total number of SUVs on the road and that's a lot of gallons saved.

Hyundai (pronounced hun-day) states that the QarmaQ Advanced Technology Demonstration Vehicle is a seamless blending of 30 environmentally progressive technologies that encompass the total vehicle design. Safety, economy, environment, and drivability are brought together in an aesthetically unique package that brings some strong design messages to the forefront of automotive engineering. Hyundai drops the gauntlet of change at the feet of the auto manufacturing world stating: "The QarmaQ is lighter, stronger, and more economical than any current production CUV in its class. It also offers significant recycling advantages both in construction and eventual disassembly. In short, it is a viable and realistic glimpse of the future potential of personal automotive transport. "

In addressing the issues of safety, Hyundai goes beyond the prime consideration of vehicle occupants and considers also the vehicle's surrounding world. Realizing that in continually compacting metro environments, our motor vehicles sometimes are involved with unavoidable pedestrian contacts, Hyundai has taken that as a design challenge and has trademarked QarmaQ's "Elastic Front" safety system and calls it "the world's first global pedestrian protection system." This system utilizes multiple advanced materials with inherent energy absorption properties and creates a vehicle skin that, when coupled with specialized underpanel construction elements, seeks to dissipate the force of impact and thereby reduce victim trauma in cases of vehicle/pedestrian collision. The Hyundai Elastic Front system is currently undergoing final testing to accomplish EEVC WG17 Phase2, Euro NCAP, and JNCA pedestrian impact requirement validation.