Sign Of The Times: Camry Tops “Most America n Vehicle” List

Sign Of The Times: Camry Tops ?Most American Vehicle? List

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Cars.com tackles the tough question of domestic content in its latest ?American Made Index,? and comes away with a surprising result: Toyota?s Camry is the most ?American? car on the market. Of course, making these distinctions in a global industry is fraught with difficulty. Though percentage of domestic parts content is tracked by the NHTSA for American Automobile Labeling Act compliance (PDF), those numbers count US and Canadian parts as being ?domestic?. So Cars.com has created its own list which requires US assembly, at least 75 percent US-sourced parts content, and factors in sales numbers because ?they correlate to the number of U.S. autoworkers employed to build any given model and to build the parts that go into those same cars.? Taking out vehicles that are being canceled with no clear replacement, the following vehicles make up their top ten ?most American? automobiles.

  1. Toyota Camry (Georgetown, KY; Lafayette, IN)

  1. Ford F-150 (Dearborn, MI; Claycomo, MO)

  2. Chevrolet Malibu (Kansas City, KS)

  1. Honda Odyssey (Lincoln, AL)

  2. Chevrolet Silverado 1500 (Fort Wayne, IN)

  1. Toyota Sienna (Princeton, IN)

  2. Toyota Tundra (San Antonio, TX)

  1. GMC Sierra 1500 (Fort Wayne, IN)

  2. Ford Taurus (Chicago, IL)

  1. Toyota Venza (Georgetown, KY)

In short, only half of the top ten ?most American? vehicles are actually made the Detroit automakers (and only one-third are made by the taxpayer-owned firms). Of course, a lot of that has to do with Detroit?s tanking sales numbers, as well as GM?s slashing of its Pontiac line (disqualifying its vehicles on the ?no obvious replacement? front. Still, former AMI perennials like the Chevy Cobalt have fallen off the list because their percentage of domestic parts content has actually fallen. While none of this is conclusive in terms of measuring impacts on the American economy, it?s another interesting look at an industry that is far too complicated to measure in terms of pure nationality.

Reply to
Jim Higgins
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Hear, hear!

The biggest, and possibly the easiest to determine, 'domestic' element is the sales & marketing cost.

DAS

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Reply to
Dori A Schmetterling

Would it kill them to have included Canadian-sourced parts, Canadian assembled cars, and Canadian sales numbers?

Canadians buy US-built cars too.

I bet including Canada would dramatically change those numbers, and probably mean that some Chrysler vehicles would appear in that list.

I was going to copy this post as an e-mail to thetruthaboutcars.com but I could find no editorial e-mail address (or any e-mail address) for them or for Edward Niedermeyer on their web site.

Reply to
MoPar Man

Give it up, the operative sentence was at the end:

"... it's another interesting look at an industry that is far too complicated to measure in terms of pure nationality.."

In other words, the author of the article started out with this statement as a supposition and set about adjusting his query parameters to arrive at his desired result.

The fact is that this is a false supposition. Where nationality matters is jobs. A nation is failing it's citizens if it cannot provide them with an economy where they can all work and bring home money to use to put food on the table. If the national government cannot do that, there's no point in having it. Conservatives like to claim that the only job of the national government is defense, but that's BS. The first priority of a national government is to manage the country's economy. Defense is a second priority, and you cannot have a good defence if the country's economy cannot fund it.

It's got to the point that I think most Americans would be better off if the US Government were to simply disappear and the US were to accept the government of Japan as it's legitimate government. At least the Japanese government cares about having it's citizens working, the US government has ceased caring about that a long time ago.

Most US citizenry have basically already done this, just not admitted it. Look around your desk and how much stuff do you see is made by Japanese-owned firms, and Chinese-owned firms, in Japan and in China. Now compare that to how much stuff is made by American-owned firms in the US. Enough said.

Ted

Reply to
Ted Mittelstaedt

My, my, we are having difficulty understanding international business. Navel-gazing lives!

How about considering how many cars/products are made outside the US by US companies.

DAS

To send an e-mail directly replace "spam" with "schmetterling"

Reply to
Dori A Schmetterling

The problem is without manufacturing in the USA, jobs are becoming more scarce. How long can a countries people live well with just service industry jobs? Yes next there will be cars from China, using our technology. Then Japanese cars built in NAFTA will become too expensive.

Perhaps the, too expensive for me, BMWs and Mercedes sold in the USA will still be built in the USA.

Reply to
Some O

Don't disagree. Problem (loss of manufacturing jobs) possibly even greater in the UK -- though there are now some signs of trend reversal -- but the answer isn't in moaning, erecting barriers and subsidising.

Germany and Japan have larger manufacturing sectors but are also having to deal with becoming uncompetitive. Like elswhere the companies transplant manufacturing or move up the technological ladder.

Think of computers. AFAIK largely US-invented or developed technology (even if Alan Turing was British)... but hardware manufactured in Taiwan or Malaysia, or wherever. Would it have reached the masses so quickly, or would the cost of ever-increasing computing power have come down so quickly if the manufacturers had played the nationalistic game?

Anyway, countries don't maintain econonomic and political leadership for ever. Hard to imagine that 100 years ago Britain was top dog and the US was nowhere. Hundreds of years ago science flourished in Arab lands, now it's 'buried'.

The US has had -- and is still having -- a very good run!

DAS

To send an e-mail directly replace "spam" with "schmetterling"

Reply to
Dori A Schmetterling

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