The heads of General Motors and Ford have expressed remorse for begging the American taxpayer for a $34 billion hand-out and insisted they were learning from their mistakes as America's biggest carmaker pledged to scrap all executive pay across its entire board.

Their contrite remarks were made before the Senate Banking Committee on Capitol Hill which had assembled to grill Rick Wagoner, the head of General Motors, Alan Mulally, the chief executive of Ford, and Robert Nardelli, who runs Chrysler, on whether federal funds should be employed to avert the collapse of the American car industry.

Mr Wagoner sought to convince Washington that General Motors needs an $18 billion loan in order to survive the sharpest fall in car sales since the 1950s.

He urged Capitol Hill to lend General Motors the money in two tranches, with $3 billion made available immediately, to prevent the carmaker running out of cash by the end of the year.

Chrysler is requesting an immediate $7 billion sum by the end of the year. Ford wants a $9 billion line of credit that it said it would not tap unless economic conditions worsened.

Both Mr Wagoner and Mr Nardelli proposed a March 31 deadline by which time they would return to Washington to show that their restructuring was progressing as a condition of receiving financial assistance from the taxpayer.

Mr Wagoner testified: "We're here today because we have made mistakes, which we are learning from. But this is a job worth doing."

He pledged that in return for state aid, which he said GM should be able to start repaying in 2011 and fully repay the following year, the car maker would increase the number of fuel-efficient cars it made, reduce costs, seek to renegotiate onerous employee contracts with unions, significantly restructure its balance sheet, continue to suspend its dividend to shareholders and effectively scrap all executive pay in return for a federally-funded rescue. Under his proposals, the GM board would take $1 a year in pay in the event that Washington bail them out.

Each of the three executives, Ron Gettelfinger - the president of the United Auto Workers union, and representatives of car part suppliers and dealership organisations across the country, gave evidence to the committee and were then questioned.

Lawmakers are loath to throw good money after bad, using taxpayer funds to prop up near-bust industries and want to be certain that the carmakers are sufficiently robust to be able to recover and to pay the American taxpayer back, with interest.

Chris Dodd, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, said: "I want to know whether the automobile companies are in dire straits. I want to know that if they fail, what would the consequences be. And I want to know whether the US Government has a responsibility to help them."

Alan Mulally, the head of Ford, admitted that the carmaker had made foolish mistakes in the past but that it had rectified them. "In the past we thought, 'if you build it, they will come'. Now we are aggressively matching production to meet customer demand."

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