The american taxpayer has been dictating the cars to build all along. This may not jive with your personal aesthetic, but the reason the car companies all built huge trucks and fast sports cars through the past fifteen years was because these are the vehicles people wanted to buy. Those buyers were these same 'taxpayers' that you now think wanted something else.
It's a wee bit more complicated than that. A lot of consumers bought a product that was marketed to them, very skillfully. These consumers, for the most part, are also taxpayers. Other taxpayers chose not to buy that product because we looked at it and said, "Wow, only an idiot would buy that." Now it's the taxpayers -- not the consumers who "dictat[ed] the cars to build" -- who are being asked to foot the bill. So, since I didn't "dictate", can I get a pass on paying for the bailout?