A thoughtful post.
Ford bought Volvo, Jaguar. (as my old dad used to say) "Dadgum", I hated that.
So the notion is that consolidation is good. Mergers, buyouts, etc. Consolidating redundant functions. Keep that theme in mind. One Accounting dept, one IT department, one Marketing Dept., etc. (And we'll outsource whatever we can, you know the "Almighty Dollar" and it's irrepressible preferences for efficiency, and of course you know India is posed as a nation to eclipse the entire middle class in all "Western" nations via outsourcing. And why not, if it's better cheaper faster, etc. (Whatever, that's another discussion.))
So, lets get sophistic, and take the example to the extreme.
Eventually, after uncountable mergers and buyouts, the is only one car company... we'll call it the omni car. Everyone drives one of the 9 different models of the "Omni Car".
The free marketeers (Read conservative, if American read Republican) say "Great!, more power to them!", economies of scale and the like, delivering to the consumer a better product. The pure market at work. The market will make us whole, the market is our mother, our father, our benefactor at large.
So some would say that time was ripe for an upstart, a rival sprung from the seeds of necessity, right place at the right time, etc ,etc. And that would have been true prior to the tech-age we live in. The problem is that we have a thing called the "Experience Curve" and an upstart could not compete due to the impossibility of acquiring their own proprietary (as their rivals cradle) technology. The "Omni" car would be very advanced, after all. It would comprise, as proprietary data, 100 years of automotive knowledge.
Would your banker give a loan on something other than one of the "Omni" models?
It's rather depressing, sorry to have posted it.