auto tune up

I can't visualize your first statement. I'll look into it, though. Sounds "Fordy".

Human bodies reject donor organs all the time. What's the big deal?

Indeed.

Toyota MDT in MO

I sent you e-mail at the above address...

Cracks me up!

And the Aussie Falcon from what I've heard. Use an already-Federalized powertrain in it (to meet smog regs) and import it. It being a big car, making it pass Fed crash tests shouldn't be undoable either.

The Focus isn't half-bad, either, if a smallish FWD car is what you want...

-Andrew

I wasn't counting offshore products, by all reports both Ford and Generic Motors offer a lot better product line elsewhere, esp. Australia. Sad...

The Focus didn't even register as I pretty much wrote that off as a possibility after a friend of mine bought one new and had it recalled SEVEN times in the first year...

nate

...thus ruining it halfway.

The other halfway would be accomplished in the typically corporate "Americanization" of the car not for regulatory compliance, but to meet what out-of-touch Ford executives think Americans want.

It's not half-good.

Or what Americans do actually want. Sadly, you and I and most of the rec.autos.tech crew aren't the average American - we're car geeks. However, the problem of bad Americanization could be solved by allowing buyers to select options "a la carte." Don't want 55-way auto climate control? Fine, you can delete it and have manual HVAC. No power driver's seat? Fine too, we'll bolt a manual module in for 'ya. Harder suspension? Ok, you can get the sport handling package.

Here's an idea - ship cars to dealers more or less unfinished and have certain option modules be orderable. It won't work for all options like transmission types, but it would be cool if you could have your dealer (for example) install an interior out of parts that are ordered seperately. For example, you could specify 2 cloth front seats and a non-stain vinyl rear seat for the dog/kids. Manual climate control, but with rear ducting. Right power mirror, left manual since you can reach it. Oil, fuel, and tach gauges but no water temp gauge (make gauges snap-in modules in the dash panel like on 80s Volvo 240s). Sport suspension but with steel wheels for NYC potholes.

This system would have the added benefit of saving assembly time at the factory, and, well, dealers' workers aren't UAW.

-Andrew

Every car that's been "Americanized" into the rough equivalent of a Chevrolet Lumina has been a miserable sales failure, because it's much more expensive to design a car and then water it down, than it is to design it from the start as a watered-down crapmobile. Witness the Scorpio (people didn't see the point of the extra $10K and bought a Taurus instead) or the TC (people didn't see the point of the extra $10K and bought a Lebaron instead). Witness the "GTO".

The evidence carries on piling up that these kinds of importation exercises are little more than efforts by the US automakers to "prove" to themselves that Americans would really rather have Tauruses and Cavaliers.

Oddly enough, when European and Asian automakers bring cars to North America that are not significantly "Americanized", limiting changes to those needed for US regulatory compliance...Americans buy them!

There's a lesson in there somewhere, but the US automakers aren't interested in it.

At dealer service department labor rates and competence levels? No thanks.

DS

That's an interesting idea, but it doesn't really solve the issue of why

*I* won't buy an American car - it's not the fact that I can't get exactly what I want, it's the fact that everything available is *so far* from what I want that it's ludicrous.

Really, my ideal car would be something along the lines of the new Mustang but with IRS, but a bare-bones "stripper" model with the only options being something along the lines of a towing or pursuit package (for the HD electrics and all the fluid coolers) and full instrumentation. A/C would be nice, but manual controls would be fine. The *real* problem is that only the Mustang even comes close to fitting the bill for what kind of car I'd like; everything else is either FWD or so bloated and grotesque that it's not worth consideration. I'd say that new little Pontiac 2-seater might be interesting, but knowing GM they'll make it suck somehow (remember the Fiero? Yeah, I know, they finally worked out all the bugs before they discontinued it, kind of like Microsoft does. Oh, wait, Microsoft discontinues stuff without even bothering to fix it.)

Basically what I want is a basic commuter car that's also a sports car, is reasonably economical, and will last essentially forever, given regular maintenance and TLC. Nothing even remotely like that has rolled out of an American manufacturer's gates in decades, and we could debate all day on whether any American cars ever made actually meet that standard, but the fact remains that several German and Japanese manufacturers to this day are building vehicles that are a much better attempt at what I look for in a car than anything American.

For those with a family, something like the GTO but in a 4-door version would be just great. Doesn't have to be as powerful, but still, don't family guys also like to drive a good-handling, responsive car? Maybe that little straight six they're putting in the small SUVs would be the ticket, I remember when the Envoy first came out some guys I know that had done some development work on the brakes spoke very highly of the powertrain. Only thing even close currently available is the Crown Vic, which again is huge, has no manual transmixer and seems to be aimed squarely at the Florida Bingo set or the 300C which I could say just the same thing about except it seems to be aimed at the "check out my phat rims, yo" set.

The sad thing is that I think the average American is perfectly happy with an Impala or Taurus, thus explaining the crap that floods the market these days. I know that's a difficult concept to wrap one's mind around, but when you think about it, that's the only logical explanation.

nate

Dodge Charger or Magnum. Ok, they have no manny tranny, but both cars are quite roomy inside, good handling from all I've heard, and available for about $25k with the 3.5L V-6.

-Andrew

To me, they are still too big and the lack of a manual is a huge negative. I must be unusual; I had a BMW 535i for about a year or so at one point and I just couldn't get over how freaking huge the thing was. I felt guilty driving it around with all that wasted space, although it was occasionally nice when I could haul around four friends in the same car (how often does that happen though?)

I have to say, the 535i was a car that I could have lived with for a long time though had I not a) blowed it up real good (I suspect that the previous owner had dogged it out some, and, well, it *did* have 200K miles on it) b) taken it to a shop that replaced the motor successfully but introduced an electrical gremlin that was never fixed that caused it to crap out after about 20 minutes or so of driving and c) known that the suspension was so worn out that it would have cost more than the car was worth to fix it to pass any kind of state safety inspection - not to mention that the hydraulic accumulator was busted as well, causing, um, interesting braking response (I was living in Ohio at the time, but knew I'd move out of state eventually) Loved the torque and the sound of that big six. Again, the kind of car that shouldn't have been that hard to translate into an American idiom, but never has been...

nate

If I were doing it, I'd 'translate' something like the later Volvo 960 or 940T into the American idiom. More geared towards durability than outright performance, although the I-6 engines have ample performance. Yeah, the 1st-gen I-6s had problems like block porosity and timing belts that needed replacement every 20k miles, but these problems were ironed out and the same basic engine (with turbo) is used in the S80 to this day.

I'd do away with the power front seats (who needs them, just more to break) and auto climate control, though. K.I.S.S.

-Andrew

There could also be the phenomenon that American branded cars are generally regarded as inferior products, so only people buying by price or fleets will buy them. So even if an American branded car happens to be good, people interested in quality will generally ignore it. So that creates a disincentive for car companies to put their newest designs and best cars in their American brands.

Notice that Ford tends to give the newest designs and platforms to its "import" brands Mazda and Volvo, while the Ford brand in the US gets older designs or hand me downs:

Ford Focus -- still the old Focus, while Mazda and Volvo (and Ford in Europe) have second generation Focus platform cars Ford Fusion -- an adaptation of the platform that first appeared in the Mazda 6 Ford 500 and Freestyle -- an adaptation of the Volvo platform that first appeared several years ago as the Volvo S60, V70, and S80.

However, the tendency of people in the US to buy off the lot, rather than ordering cars, means that there probably is not much gain for the car company to offer a long option sheet, as opposed to bundling options in a small number of packages and trim levels (that is simpler to build and won't cause dealers to be stuck with "strangely" optioned cars whose only buyers are 1000+ miles away). Even if the long option sheet was "order only", a dealer may be reluctant to order the car in case the buyer is unable to buy, leaving the dealer stuck with a car that won't sell to typical buyers walking through the showroom.

Of course, some "Americanizations" are not typically found on option lists. Red or yellow rear turn signals, for example. Or do you want side-visible turn signals?

But traditionally American car makers did the opposite, offering long lists of options while the Japanese offered not only fewer options but also packaged them in sets.

Are the cars bad because people won't buy them, or do people not buy them because the cars are bad?.

I think the latter; they certainly sell enough to fleets and the few remaining "buy American" die hards... if they made more appealing products there's a lot of people who would prefer to buy from the home team if possible (like myself)

nate

If brand X has heated sun visors and brand Y doesn't, people won't buy brand Y. Cupholder mentality.

The problem is; people keep buying the bad stuff.

Both. (More accurately, car companies have little incentive to produce top quality cars under their American brands, because that would alienate the "cheap" buyers and fleets, while failing to attract "quality" buyers due to the (often well deserved) quality stigma.)