The main hall of the Detroit auto show has long been a place of Machiavellian maneuvers, with powerful car makers defending their prime turf while banishing the weak and the weird to Cobo Center's basement.
But it is different this year at the North American International Auto Show. Brands like Pontiac, Saturn and Saab are dead or dying, and high-end manufacturers like Porsche, Rolls-Royce and Aston Martin are staying away. So the main hall suddenly had room for Chinese hybrids, Korean electrics and other ''green'' cars whose makers invariably billed themselves as visionaries.
The mass-market automakers left standing moved on, determined to do something to revive morale for the beaten-down industry. And this year's show certainly improved on last year's grim spectacle, which was followed by General Motors' and Chrysler's plunge into bankruptcy and government bailouts.
Modestly optimistic that sales have bottomed, the gathered companies again are trying to perform their trickiest balancing act: hedging their green bets so they devote neither too few resources, nor too many, to technologies that could save, distract or bankrupt them, depending on how they roll the dice.
For example, judging from the prominence of the 37,000-square-foot ''Electric Avenue'' exhibit, an observer might think that most Americans buy hybrids, or that electric cars exist beyond golf-course communities and a handful of upper-crust garages.
The cold reality is that nearly 98 percent of Americans choose conventional internal-combustion cars. Hybrids, which still have gasoline engines, account for most of the rest.
Yet despite the need to sell many more cars in 2011 and beyond, automakers large and small seemed to agree that dazzling, affordable battery vehicles are what's required to rescue the industry, save the planet and get average people excited about cars again.
Adopting that auto-show story line, automakers took turns declaring a desire to seize electric-car leadership. Jesse Toprak, vice president for industry trends at TrueCar.com, a consumer Web site, said automakers' environmental efforts seem increasingly sincere, driven in part by tough fuel economy standards to take full effect in 2016.
The strategy is, ''If I'm forced to produce these green cars, let's figure out a way to make money and make a splash,'' Toprak said.
