Detroit may be collapsing, but Los Angeles’ car show must go on.

This year's Los Angeles Auto Show, which opened to the public last Friday and is running through the Thanksgiving weekend, has an almost surreal tinge. Car shows are supposed to be cheerful orgies of shiny sheet metal, but this time around, with the Big Three Detroit automakers basically going out of business simultaneously, the scene has been reduced to an uncomfortable charade enacted against the backdrop of looming financial ruin.

On the show floor, before the public was admitted to the event, the GM and Chrysler displays were like carpeted, spotlit mausoleums. Both companies canceled their new product revelations and nixed press conferences. Instead, GM rolled out a lot of familiar vehicles that everyone has already seen, and even the company's supposedly game-changing Chevy Volt—a revolutionary plug-in electric vehicle—got subdued treatment: It sat demurely on a small, lonely dais.

Chrysler, which is owned by private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management, looked to be in even worse shape. (The company isn't required to report its financials, but CEO Robert Nardelli recently admitted that, unless the government pulls the trigger on the bailout, Chrysler will be doomed next year.) Chrysler, the beneficiary of one of the last big Washington bailouts, went so far as to make its Southern California dealer network foot the bill for the Los Angeles show displays—which, as many commentators noted, were dankly underlit.

The show's organizers probably didn't intend the show to become a gloomy referendum on the U.S. car business, but that's what came across. The L.A. event is supposed to be about the future—green cars, concept cars, fabulous new luxury cars that will stoke the Hollywood factor—and function as a pep rally for the media. This year, however, the signature media moment wasn't a flashy product "reveal"; it was the shiver that went through the press room when CNBC reported that the CEOs of General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler had all been sent back, via their individual private jets, from Washington with no bailout agreement on the $25 billion loan that the industry has been seeking.

So, it came as almost a shock that Ford—which has a better cash position than its Detroit brethren but is also facing plummeting sales and huge loses—brought a relatively ambitious game plan to Los Angeles. Ford wasn't in the same hall as forlorn GM and Chrysler—it was instead over with the big Japanese manufacturers, Toyota and Honda. Plus, Ford unveiled new cars and fresh designs: a new Fusion hybrid, a new Mercury Milan hybrid, a revamp of the mighty Mustang. The company's overall presentation was also aggressively green. And even on the old school Motown front, Ford was winning: Sales of pickup trucks, a profitable core product, are rebounding, and Ford's F-150 is the longtime sales leader.

"We have an incredible amount of new products launching next year," Alan Hall, a Ford communications director, told me, sounding very much like a guy who expects to have a job in 2009. "We need to properly introduce them to consumers. There is no better place to do so than at auto shows."