Please stop with the conspiracy stories. I hate cars more than anyone, but all this "Big Auto" stuff just discredits the entire thing as a bunch of fanatics.
The idea that everyone hated cars and the evil car lobby came in and forced it upon them is flat out incorrect.
What the auto industry accomplished was to push the government to favor cars to the eventual exclusion of almost every other form of transit.
Even if people didn't hate cars, this still wasn't a fair fight in an open market. It was an industry co-opting consumer and voter power.
This idea is not present in the article and is a wild exaggeration of your own.
Even Paris discussed in TFA is 10 times better than 99% of American cities... and most of European cities are even better walkability wise...
It's also, and that's totally real and extremely common, big business interests, politicians, etc, working together to further their profits in covert ways, with under the table deals, bribes, trusts, price fixing, and several other ways...
Ever head of "conspiracy to commit fraud"? The real courts punish tons of cases of very real conspiracies every year...
Just because you've been conditioned by pop culture to associate conspiracies with aliens and illuminati and crazy people, doesn't mean actual conspiracies involving big car lobbies, big petrol, big pharma, big food, etc, don't happen every day...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AFn7MiJz_s
Adam Ruins Everything - Why Jaywalking Is a Crime