Why Do Some Import Owners LIie About Their Cars?

In this case, it's because Toyota is very liberal with replacing engines for customers and GM is not. it's that simple. The service you get from your local dealer does a lot to change your perception of your vehicle.

nate

It doesn't make sense to me. Case in point. One of my friends is a classic example.

He swears he will never own an american car again after having problems with his Dodge Avenger (97 or 98 I think). He won't go near Fords or GMs because of this (I can see avoiding Chrysler products perhaps, but GM and Ford had nothing to do with his Avenger). Instead he has vowed only to buy Japanese cars forever more. When I pointed out to him that in fact, his Avenger was a reskinned Mitsubishi and was in reality more Japanese than American he had no response, yet still refuses to look at American cars.

Go figure ... logic just doesn't apply when it comes to Zealotry.

Of course there are some die-hard GM fans that are equally stubborn and refuse to concede that their vehicle has flaws as well. And the same can be said for Ford fans, etc.

There has been millions of lines of blather written about the exploding Ford Pinto but not much written about the exploding Toyota of the same time period (huh, imagine that). People are always making reference to the rust problem on GM products but never mention that Hondas, Toyotas, etc. also rust if they are subjected to the same conditions.

I worked with a group of people who loved imports. One guy owned a Saab and a Porsche (that had just undergone a complete factory restoration by the previous owner). The other guy owned a Honda and an Acura. I owned a Chevy Celebrity sedan and a Chevy pickup truck. In a period of 4 years. The Saab took only minor repairs, the Porsche took $10,000+ in repairs. The Honda required hundreds in repairs and the Acura blew an engine, costing thousands. My car required only a few hundred in repairs and the truck required a couple hundred in repairs. To this day, the other guys think that they had the better vehicles (well they did because they were imports lol). The guy that owned the Acura, bought a used 1988 Celebrity wagon (it was

10 years old at the time) and drove it for years with very little trouble but complained about the "unreliability" of the Chevy as compared to the Acura (huh, did I miss something here?). Two years ago, my neighbor bought the Celebrity wagon and is still driving it with only minor problems (now try to remember that the Chevy celertity is a piece of junk). Personally, I have never owned a Chevy that had fewer than 100,000 miles on it when I traded or sold it and all of them were in good condition at the end of their time with me.

You hear about the "crud" problem with the Dexcool in GM engines but you rarely hear about the "crud" problem in the Toyota oiling systems (according to Toyota, it's the fault of the owner). Volkswagen also had a crud problem in their air-cooled engine that persisted for years but you rarely heard about it.

I worked with Japanese engineers for years and a few things that I've learned from them is that given the choice between a small car and a big car, they'll take a big car; they are great at re-engineering someone else's idea but not very good at origiinal thought (has to do with their 'everyone must conform' society).

Many people know that Subaru had a 'hill holder' clutch in the 1980's and then resurected it in the Forester but do they know that Studebaker introduced it in the 1937 Studebaker Dictator? The Variable valve timing in the Honda is well known but what about the variable valve timing in the 1903 Cadillac Model A Runabout (whick also had rack and pinion steering)? The dual overhead cam engine is well know in Japanese cars bur it was the Italians who introduced it in 1913 in a Fiat (Toyota introduced their first engine in 1967).

I've owned/driven numerous imported and domestic cars and I can say that I have likes and dislikes among all of them. I lived in Europe for 3 years and it exposed me to many makes of cars that people in this country rarely hear of, and have never ridden in or driven, but I would never go to a discussion group of any of those vehicles just to try to discourage people from buying them (people who do tat are correctly called trolls). The opinions of these people should be received in the spirit of which it was given. The thing about opinions is that they are like rectums; everyone has one (but some people are one).

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% "So why do I drive a big SUV? It's because I have to haul numerous people and things to places." ~ R. Lee Baxton ~

Ok, "nate" if you say so!

That could be part of it. GM is a piece of shit when it comes to covering some of their crappier mistakes.

The Toyota issue is not totally clear. If you don't change your oil when you should, then you could have a problem. (If you DO change your oil when they recommend, then you could STILL have a problem.)

Who knows?

I suspect it is a mixture of a pissy design and poor maintainance.

The GM plenum problem is a shitteaux cockup that GM never stepped up to the plate to address. So are the gasket problems on the smaller V6s.

You may bitch and moan, but I have no allegiance to any company. GM has been a turd about fixing problems that came about because of shitty engineering.

If they go bankrupt, so be it.

Drive by any domestic dealers lot a take note of all the so called superior imports sitting on the used car lots. The only time one hears from Toyota, and other foreign car owners, about the problems they have with their cars is after they trade them on something else. I guess they are embarrassed to admit they paid a premium price thinking they were buying a car that would not break down only to find they had fallen for the foreign cars are better myth. The fact is every manufacture builds some that are no up to snuff on occasion, that is why they all offer a warranty, even Rolls Royce. The last half dozen domestics I have owned have been just as good and dependable as the foreign cars I had been buying. The only real difference I see is style and price and domestics can be driven home and replaced for thousands less.

mike hunt

Gee, Mikey, did you somehow miss this from a thread in .toyota?

[extract from...] Cars' Useful Lives Are Longer Than Ever, Sending Ripples Through Auto Industry February 27, 2006; Page D3 [snip] Nonetheless, sales data also suggest that a lot of consumers put a high value on brands that have a track record of delivering cars that last. The brands that had the biggest market-share gains during the 2000-to-2005 period -- BMW, Toyota, Nissan and Honda -- also had relatively strong records for functional reliability, according to an analysis by Walden Consultants. Chevrolet, Ford, Dodge and Chrysler have lost share or stayed flat in that period, and they also have worse-than-average reliability records -- based on data for repair frequency gathered from consumer surveys conducted by IndustrialMR Inc. Henry Allessio, managing director at Walden Consultants, says Walden zeroes in on repairs that take the vehicle off the road, and concludes that Honda and Toyota have 22% fewer such breakdowns than the industry average. [snip]

Toyota and Honda have fewer breakdowns. GM, Ford, Chyrsler have worse than average reliabiliyt. How could you miss this? You were bloviating in that very thread (among many others). Don't bother to read the posts you're responding to?

One of my co-workers found his Honda Odyssey tranny slipping at 97K miles. Honda REPLACED it FREE. They didn't flush it and tell him to come back in a few thousand miles and they'd take another look. I replaced the transmission in my Ford three times before 60K miles and Ford's attitude was "tough luck for you."

Fewer problems plus actual customer care? Maybe the import owners have reasons to be happy with their cars.

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It's true they don't, but then owners of high end domestic cars don't complain about problems either. One advantage "foreign" car manufacturers have here is thet prove new designs in their home market. Over the years I've been stung 3 times with horrible new design problems in domestic cars. I stuck it out and in all cases it wasn't until well into the third year that the design problems were corrected. It cost me much time and $s in each case. My attempt is not to buy a new mechanical design until at least the third year; now I'm much more fussy in my car choice.

The Pinto was a blast, in fact after a look at it I would never have bought one. There are a few domestic vehicles, one Chrysler SUV in particular I'm thinking of, which also have it's fuel tanks adjacent to the rear bumper. I'm sure it also occasionally blasts off!

I had 3 Beetles (from 1956 to 1966) and never experienced this problem, nor was I aware of it even though I had several friends with Beetles. The Beetles certainly had some maintenance problems, but it's pluses made it stand out as unique in that era of domestic car gas eating BOATS!

I've owned small to large mid sized, give me a small mid sized car (Ford-Fusion, Sebring, etc.) any day. In fact that is what I'm looking for now. My golfing friend has a '95 Lincoln and it amazes me how inferior some aspects of it's design are compared to my '95 Concord. Also some of it's design is making it very troublesome in it's maturity, like the air suspension.

So what that VVT was in the 1903 Cadillac, we are talking today when Honda and Toyota are leading the world auto industry in VVT. Also there are many aspects to VVT, the superior results Honda and Toyota are currently indicate they know more about it, or are putting more V into VVT. Why did GM drop that very early lead in VVT technology. Was it for cheap manufacturing? Same for Dual OH cams, we are talking todays cars. You are so in the past, you sound like one of those old staid GM top managers who have let MY GM slump to so low a level it may not rise again.

OK if you need a big SUV to run a bus around, but many seen on the road seldom have more than the driver and sometimes one passenger. Around here Vans carry numerous people.

*Scores represent problems per 100 vehicles after 3 years of ownership*

"[According to] J.D. Power's surveys, the story for American luxury brands -- Lincoln, Cadillac and Buick -- is particularly striking. Of those three brands Lincoln performed best in the 2005 survey, ranking third of all brands -- behind Lexus, as always, and Porsche -- with a score of 151. Buick was fourth overall with a score of 163, matching a score that earned Lexus a top ranking just two years earlier. Cadillac was fifth with

175 problems per 100 vehicles.

Nissan's luxury brand, Infiniti, ranked sixth on the survey while Honda's luxury brand, Acura, ranked 10th, lower than the American luxury brands.

In fact, Lincoln, Cadillac and Buick all out-scored Toyota's Toyota-branded and Honda's Honda-branded vehicles in the same 2005 J.D. Powers survey.

GM and Ford's non-luxury brands didn't do quite as well but the Ford brand and GM's Chevrolet came out above average.

See the table for the details but, as it turns out, a lot of Japanese brands -- everything from Mazda right down to Isuzu -- came off worse in the survey than the worst GM brand, Pontiac."

That is one opinion but apparently even MORE buyer are happy with their GM, Ford, and Chrysler product, since GM, Ford, and Chrysler continue to outsell ALL of the import brands combined. ;)

mike hunt

Toyota-branded

That is interesting but it's more recent vehicles only. Walden, quoted in the WSJ article, appears to also consider old vehicles, so reliabillity, rather than just initial quality, comes more heavily into play. It could also be that GM and Ford have recently done more to close the gap but it will take time for the numbers to show this.

This next chart is also recent vehicles only but may illustrate the economic advantages of having reliability that's even just fractionally above the norm:

the position of Volvo. Also consider that the way these figures are,they must be weighted by unit sales. Moreover, if you read further down the article, Consumer Reports, which also considers older vehicles and is skewed more towards reliability, continues to rate the Japanese more highly.

Consider that automakers have a cost consideration with initial quality that they don't have for long-term reliability, the problems of the first three years are a warranty repair. Long-term reliability, while it may turn off the market, doesn't have the same direct profitability impact.

I generally keep cars for a long time and/or buy them a few years used, so long-term reliability is very important to me.

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They don't? Isn't a large part of the demographic that buy such cars affluent older retired folks? Let me tell you, that's a group that complains and fusses over the slightest of things.

It's true that some older people buy expensive cars and complain about them, but my observation of car drivers on the road tells me that most high end cars are bought by middle age high rollers. By the way I'm an older person who doesn't buy high end cars, but I expect a lot of my car. I get a new one about every 6 to 10 yrs, so I take a lot of time picking one. Currently my Chrysler Concord is 11 yrs old, the oldest car I've run. I'm still looking and am having trouble finding what I want- a Sebring sized station wagon. Unfortunately the small SUVs have currently pushed them off the market.

In Europe small mid sized wagons are very popular, perhaps I'll have to buy an "ugly import". Just read an article on the Saab wagon, a possibility and it's a GM car. Ford doesn't have a Fusion wagon, but the Mazda 6 wagon from whence the Fusion came is another possibility. It's a Ford isn't it!

I know the feeling...

My anger at GM has to do with the tendency toward repeating failures with some of the systems, and a relatively low quality level. Their body integrity is not what it once was, nor what it should be. I don't care if it IS cheap to buy, I would like something a bit better.

I haven't bought a Ford in years. Almost succumbed in 1990 when I wanted a Thunderbird (until I drove several of them). The shimmy shake ride of those models certainly turned off my ardor for them.

Price IS an issue at some level, but I don't want another plastic plenum fiasco, or intake gasket farce, or CS- alternator suckertrap, or Metric transmission weakness which will make me think twice about taking the car on the road.

Americans tend to buy 'Fords and Chevrolets' out of habit. They tend to buy big cars, and gas guzzling SUV's even when gas is $3.00 per gallon. This is often referred to as 'tunnel vision'.

The trend toward buying Japanese label cars, and even German label cars, is clear however. These cars, even when built on America's shores, are becoming more and more popular because the perception is that they are better...and in some cases, the perception may be correct.

I'm sure we can all think of an American auto that had great potential. ( several come to mind ) It seems that just as they've got the design/manufacturing/component probs ironed out..... they DROP THE MODEL !!!

The TOYOTA Corolla is an example of good evolution. No major sheet-metal, or mechanical change. Each new model year incorporates improvements over the previous model year. ( a concept first pushed by Volkswagen )

And when you're putting out $15 > $20K for a new car, you want durable !!

Excuse me but you haven't yet "figured it out"?!?! GM is a BUSINESS, which means it has to make a profit - not a social welfare experiment (except for its workers and CEOs). The accountants figure out every "bean" and the car is built from there. If it's too good, and look at the $ of repair parts, they kill it in favor of a new flivver. No step-wise refinement, ala the Japanese. GM prefers a "Vega". Market share is a foregone conclusion with GM. They're basically fatalists, viewing the competition as unstoppable. GM will, mark my words, move their operation to China and continue to sell in the U.S. as a marketing-sales-repair company only. Remember, it's "General Motors" not "We The People Motors" etc. However, we'll get better cars and less cost!

Bill

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