I live in the DC Metro area. Presently, by Silver Spring. Anyhow, the coast foreign car buyers also like to claim that those like myself who buy from Ford, GM or Chrysler are racist against the Japanese. As part of my job, I research patents and technical literature for engine and transmission control algorithms. I would say that maybe one name out of a thousand published by Toyota has a non-Japanese author. "Racist" Ford, on the other hand, reads like the UN. Hell, Ed Wellborn, the head of design for Cadillac and a big factor in my next purchase - an ATS, is an African American. I have to agree that their is a sort of pathological anti-Detroit mentality on the East Coast. It gets more absurd. My brother works for NAVSEA and, due to the cost of the wars, the USN has to find ways to keep ship building costs down. He told me that the engineers they get from Metro Detroit are saving the Navy. My uncle who owned an injection molding firm had a good saying "he who does the most with the least wins". In DC that becomes "he who gets the most something for doing nothing gets his name on a building".