Ford takes a dive, DC will be #2 soon

What I can't understand about Ford and GM and even Chrysler, before giving everything up and firing a huge number of employees, why not address the quality issue by offering a free extended bumper to bumper service agreement with each new car sold. Not this driveline warranty BS that everyone knows won't actually pay for anything that is likely to break. Seems to me an extended service agreement for free would be less drastic than slowly going out of business. And in the mean time they could improve quality of bread and butter components like alterantors, speed sensors and the like. The crap that drives American car buyers crazy.

The other side of that coin is that an increasing amount of Americans have no clue as to how to maintain a car nor have the desire, and ANY failure of ANY component, including the frigging oil, is unacceptable and incomprehensible to them. That's why the dummies all buy Camrys...they go and go and go for 100K miles without proper servicing, and then the dummies throw them out like trash. I blame it on the "dumbing down" of America in general.

Bumper-to-bumper warrantys DO draw more floor traffic and increase sales, and Chrysler under Iacocca DID offer them...for awhile. You'll also remember back in the "good ol' days" when Chrysler stumped the other two with the first 5 year/50K mile powertrain warranty...NOT that it cost them too much, since their power plants and transmissions were arguably the most hardy in the industry. But people, being people, always try to scam these inclusive warrantys for stuff that's considered "consumable" and for stuff that was damaged by obvious abuse, such as 50K mile oil change intervals and the like. You also have to look at the Euros AND the Japanese, neither of whom offer bumper-to-bumper warrantys either, but outsell the "Big 2" (Ford and GM) anyway.

More and more, Chrysler is simply becoming a division of Daimler Benz AG, and more and more becoming a German presence in the US market, rather than a US automaker. That MAY be why they're selling stuff, and the "Big 2" aren't.

That sounds somewhat supercilious to condemn all those millions of car buyers all over the world who see the car only as a tool and are not in the least interested in the minutiae of maintenance. I bet most of them still change their oil and get their cars serviced one way or another.

If I am not mistaken, the world's top-selling car is the Corolla.

One of the reasons Merc cars were so popular in the Middle East was their need to be serviced only when they broke down...and that did not happen unduly often.

The biggest breakthrough in automotive technology was the reliable car.

DAS

For direct contact replace nospam with schmetterling

Correct. The US top selling car, however, is the Camry.

Yes. When I was in Saudi, you'd see the desert littered with near-new Mercedeses. The towelies would just drive them until they broke down, even for ridiculously small reasons, walk away from them, go back to Riyahd and buy a new one...with our oil money. Another American saw a gold mine and tried to harvest all these abandoned Benzes and export them to the US and Europe, and almost had his hands chopped off for his trouble. Such is "shariya," and such is the stupidity of Americans for funding this insanity since the 1940s, courtesy of Mr. Hunt, and yes....Senator Prescott Bush.

A "reliable car" isn't an unattainable feat. I've found that, over nearly 40 years, that just about any reasonably engineered car can be very reliable with a modicum of routine maintenance and a little homework by the owner. However, a poorly engineered one (Chevrolet Vega/Pontiac Astre, Hyundai Excel and pre-Ford Jags, as well as anything British, French or Italian come immediately to mind) will fail and fail again, no matter how well maintained they are. Thus, a savvy car buyer needs to understand the most basic "basics" of how the machine works and how it's maintained to expect any sort of longevity out of it.

FWIW, Benzes are NOT all that "reliable." There's simply too much diverse technology in those cars not to fail ocassionally. The Southern California Air Quality Management District, perhaps the US' foremost authority on automotive pollution, has found that gas powered Mercedeses have been consistantly the most undermaintained, and thus dirtiest running, cars on the road. This bolsters a finding by a University of Colorado professor who originally designed the "on the road" infrared smog check system in the '80s, as was exposed on "60 Minutes" back then. After years of attempts by the "smog check" industry's and the car dealers' lobbyists to keep this system out of service, it is now being implemented on freeway on ramps all over Southern California. Skinflint Mercedes owners can soon expect "pollution tickets" to be arriving in the mail.

Is Air America going to do something similar for their employees? Or are George Soros and Al Franken going to bail them out since there is no viable market for their product?

Bill Putney (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with the letter 'x')

You obviously live in the usual deluded world of right wingerism, where fact is fiction and fiction fact. Arbitron shows that AA is slowly but steadily gaining market share with their 150-some odd affiliates, while Flush Limpdick, Bill O'Rightly and Sean Insanity are dropping like rocks, up to 60% in some major markets. Limpdick has already been thrown out of a few major markets for low ratings, and has been kicked off of AM drive on several West Coast stations and moved to the midday timeslot, where ad card time is cheaper. Baltimore recently got rid of him altogether. Wake up...it's over.

That's OK...you and Charlie Nudo can massage each other while the Democrats take over the House (and maybe the Senate, too!) and throw George W. Bush into the dustbin of history along with Rummy and "Mr. Point 'N Shoot" Cheney. Meanwhile, you can contribute to the "Keep Flush Hard" fund so he can continue to buy more illegal Viagra and smuggle it through Customs...not to mention feed his OxyContin dope habit.

You right wingers sure have some shitty heroes!

The saddest part is GW is determined to leave his mess to the next president to clean up. The generals don't ask for more troops in Iraq because their mission is not to destroy the insurgency but only to train Iraqi troops and police. So thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians are doomed to die because GW doesn't have the guts to put the needed amount of troops in Iraq to fix what he broke or to just plain get the hell out.

Hmmm - lefties made fun of Quayle for spelling the plural of potato like that (but they don't care if something's right or wrong - as long as they can criticize and tear down, eh?).

Our heros/heroes are good. We're not into your budds Teddy Kennedy, Jesse Jackson, Bill Clinton, Michael Moore, Al Gore, Robert "Sheets" Byrd, Louis Farrakhan, etc.

I don't think even one thing you said is true. Hopefully Airhead America will stay in business propped up by Soros or Streisand or Moore. That'll help Republicans come erection (you seem to like suggestive plays on words) time.

Bill Putney (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with the letter 'x')

That's because he's a moron...as are most of his sheeple who still think he's "great." I wonder what they'll give my wife for killing her son....

Latest Bush numbers: Bush approval 39%. Disapproval 55%! For the record, Bush's job approval numbers haven't managed to hit 43% in ANY NATIONAL POLL in over a year and a half, an historic low trend.

Latest Congressional numbers: Generic ballot, Dems vs. GOP: Dems favored to win, 53% to 41%. This trend has been in place also for over a year.

Even f***ss blowhard Tony Blankley in the Moonie-controlled Washington Times rag says that "history favors the Democrats" in this election. Further proof is that the California Democratic Party started running very stark, unadorned video of Arnold Schwarzenegger leading a pro-Bush rally before the '04 election, with him saying many times, "GEORGE W. BUSH! GEORGE W. BUSH!" Since the ads started airing, AHHHnuld's numbers have tumbled 5%, and they've only been running three days.

It appears that the stench of "Dubya" is now rubbing off on many of his collaborators! Add to that that he's pissed off the church nutters by not magically converting the US to a Taliban-like christian theocracy, and you have real trouble for any Republican, anywhere.

So you're not going for your usual deluded paranoia that the Repbulicans will steal the election by fraud this time? Funny how that used to be the liberal mantra (for the last two Presidential elections!). The fact that they aren't expressing fear about that now means they never believed it in the first place. But if they lose in November, guess what they'll be saying? "The Republicans bought off Diebold" "The elections were rigged". I can't wait.

Bill Putney (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with the letter 'x')

More "projection" from yet another parnoid delusional "sheeple."

Wrong again, Putz-ney. He was made fun of by trying to correct a spelling bee contestant for spelling the SINGULAR of "potato" correctly. Danny the Quail erroneously thought the American spelling had an "e" at the end, and it does not.

HEROES....PLURAL

BUDS...ONE S.

Putz-ney seems to have a lack of education to go along with all that paranoid delusion.

Jackson's been shoved in a place where he's no longer a problem, as has Farrakhan. Moore's just a filmmaker. Gore's smarter than two of your could ever be. The right wing smear against Byrd is hilarious!

Unfortunately, it's ALL true. I subscribe to the Arbitron, and have the fact. You, Putz-ney, being a typical deluded rightard, have no facts, but rather enjoy having fiction serve as fact.

Dream on, Putz-ney...here, let me run my Democratic D-9 over you now. There...that feel better?

Putz-ney = KILLFILE

Sorry, they're idiots, and carmakers shouldn't have to cater to idiots. IMO, people shouldn't be allowed to drive a car on public roads without a rudimentary understanding of how it works, what it needs, and what to do when gauges and warning lights do their thing. Drivers who don't understand the basics are a danger to everyone on the road- I don't want to be behind a fool who locks up his engine because he thinks the oil light means "check it in a few days."

Are they still even on the air? I thought that mess already bombed.

I was thinking Lebanon, Jordan etc, where a 'new' taxi was an eight-year-old vehicle imported from Germany.

A modern Merc may be too complicated to withstand such rigours now.

BTW, it's not "our" (your) oil money. You buys the oil you pays your money.

Regarding a "reliable" that is my point. At some stage maybe 20/25 years ago the age of the reliable car began.

DAS

No, the saddest part is that so many head-in-the-sand types of all political persuasions don't see that what is going on NEEDS to be done. Its not fun, its not pretty, it IS a mess, but its the right thing to do and its going to take a consistent effort by *several* presidents and congresses over the next 20-plus years to make the world a reasonably safe and free place. I think anyone with a brain realized that things were going to go this way by no later than 5 PM on 9/11/01. We're in it for the long haul.

Nope! 152 affiliate stations and climbing.

Man, I hope you're telling the truth. I met that guy a while back, and he showed us some of the results of using the system. It's very clever, and simple too. A decent smog check, under load, in one second for about 10 cents. Nice guy, too.

The ONLY reason not to widely use something like that is bad politics. When people can get paid $50 for something that's only worth a dime, they'd prefer to keep doing it.

There are absolutely so signs of progress. We may be in it for the long haul but there has got to be a different approach than the one Bush is taking which is staying the course.