Jeffrey Sachs believes the Big Three should be saved.

Yet the struggle to preserve and resurrect these companies is as vital as ever to the U.S. economy, and even to our environmental future. The Big 3 are not just another industry segment. They are world-leading organizations that can reassume that role in technology and markets with an appropriate public-private partnership over the coming decade.

If the Big-3 challenge were as depicted in the press, their failure would not only be foreordained, but without much societal loss. They are widely depicted as thickheaded dinosaurs who clung to outmoded and outsized SUVs, caved to absurd union demands, denied climate change – and thereby lost, big time. Every blast has some truth, but this one is more misleading than accurate.

Sachs maintains that the decision to focus on SUVs was a “societal decision” due to a belief that low gas prices would continue indefinitely. Sachs believes that America chose not to create higher gas mileage mandates which led to low gas mileage vehicles: “The high-mileage breakthroughs of Toyota and others emanated from national policies in Japan and Europe that pushed high-mileage vehicles with stiff gasoline taxes for decades. And indeed abroad, GM and Ford sell their own fuel-efficient compact automobiles and do so very competitively. Their downfall was in the home market.”

Sachs also blames the American healthcare system and compares it to publicly financed systems:

The burdens of health care that cripple the Big 3 are similarly societal decisions as much as collective-bargaining outcomes. The idea of saddling our firms with soaring and uncontrolled health-care costs is a policy failure, not a company mistake. Our global competitors have public financing of health care, and get much more care per buck of health care than does the bloated, inefficient, private-insurance system of the United States. One can continue down the list, and include state laws that protect auto dealers and virtually block the elimination of unwanted brands, another example of misguided policies that have contributed to the Big 3 crisis.

Sachs goes on to explain that GM can be as well-placed, in his opinion, as Toyota if it has a “public partner” going forward.

However, a separate CNN commentator disagrees with Sachs’s analysis. The dissenting analyst says that unlike what Sachs argues, electric cars will not sell in huge amounts and will also be unprofitable for both GM and Chrysler. While Sachs argues that legislating higher gas mileage will create a demand for small cars, CNN argues that there is no real demand or profit in small cars; they can, however, function as loss leaders that bring young people into showrooms and gain a customer base for later in life, and they can also improve fuel efficiency of the fleet to meet regulations. CNN further argues that winning back customers who have been burned by unreliable American-made cars is not impossible, but difficult, for GM and Chrysler as well as Ford, which is now ranked on Toyota and Honda’s reliability level according to Consumer Reports.