Detroit

AMIDST THE CUTTING-EDGE Ferraris, Jaguars, and Lexus concept vehicles at the 2005 North American International Auto Show in Detroit last week was one particularly pricey concept that is a government creation: a federal tax gift to upper-class Americans buying fuel-efficient hybrid cars.

While Washington played host to the presidential inauguration, 6,000 international journalists and nearly a million spectators descended on America’s Motor City for a different kind of inauguration: the annual rollout of the auto industry’s newest products. One of the market’s hottest niches is for green vehicles like the Toyota Prius and the Honda Accord Hybrid–gasoline/electric hybrids marketed to liberal, socially-conscious buyers with six-figure incomes. In 2004, hybrid sales reached 80,000 units in the United States, mostly to “luxury-type vehicle owners, people who want to be first on their block with plasma screen TVs and all that,” says Ford spokesman Dan Bedore.