Actually, everybody in the world is jumping up and down to do business in China and India. Those are the places where GM makes money, for example, and they hold China, in particular, as their potential salvation.
Wow. New level of utter nonsense, Mike.
The first Japanese cars sold in this country were only imported a handful of years before they were redesigned into EXCELLENT small cars, for their time. The Datsun 510 and Toyota Corona come to mind. The former a BMW 1600 on the cheap and the latter a mini-version of a U.S. sedan. I remember when these cars first came out and they were the best small cars available in this country. Detroit totally ignored them until a gas crisis hit and then they came out with garbage like the Vega, Pinto, Gremlin, and Chevette.
The Korean brands were, if anything, even quicker studies. Seems like everybody learns fast except certain complacent domestics.
That's what I think. I wouldn't pay $200 for a rear window, and I wouldn't own a car that had a piece of glass in it anywhere that cost $800 to replace. That's insane. Knocking it down from $800 to $400 is just a joke. They should have started at $2000 so they could have knoocked it down to $1000. It's robbery.
This post (the part I snipped) was just a reflection of our attitudes as we age. Not your attitude, but any person's attitude. As an objective explanation of cause and effect, it's worthless. You should get to know yourself better.
It's certainly true that American cars would have had to be terribly bad to get Americans to swear off them. Compare a 1969 Oldsmobile to a 1969 Datsun and you'll see what I mean. What that tells us is that American cars were really that bad. They were so awful that now there are a bunch of Americans that won't even consider an American car for the rest of their lives.
I had a guy come over to look at buying a car from me, and I mentioned that a lot of folks wouldn't buy American, and he said "I'm in the UAW, and I wouldn't even buy one".
P.S. When you try to figure out what went wrong, don't forget the dealers. They (not GM or Ford at all) made a lot of people swear their oaths against American cars. You may say that foreign car dealers are just as bad, but they didn't have as much market share for as long, and they've not had as much opportunity to piss people off.
I'll try to do better youngster.
There's probably a lot more '69 Old's on the road that '69 Datsuns.
Talk to people that had a '69 Datsun and they might have had an engine to save at 100,000 miles but that was probably it. They were rust buckets and everything, from fenders to structural parts, rotted away only too quickly after a few years in service. As an example, the 240 Z's worth today is high. Why? Because there aren't many left of a nice design that rotted away like crazy in it's day. In fact, wasn't Datsun's quality so bad that towards the end of the '70's, maybe early '80's, they quit selling cars in the US? And a few years later, after fixing a lot of problems, came back as a company called Nissan? And isn't that a company, like Honda, that has brought out a truck that is starting to scare Detroit? Detroit has had no worthy challengers in the truck market to compete with them but now they are really scared about losing a very profitable core business. That begs the question, why? Most often things like cars don't top selling because they are too good.
Hey, I live in a town that has a GM stamping plant. My neighbor , who operates a press, said next time you drive past the plant see what's in the parking lot. I did one day. And lots of vehicles, more than half, were not of American descent.
People don't normally change unless there's a reason to change. And length of time in service is mostly irrelevant. I know people that I met a few I've met many times that have been in service a lot longer that don't piss me off.
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