I never understood Jeeps. They're these rugged-looking 4x4's which look like fun, but I'd actually be terrified to take it out into remote country because it'd inevitably break down and leave me stranded up some logging road 30 miles from anywhere. Owning a Jeep is like dating a supermodel with AIDS.
My Jeep Wrangler has never broke down on me (knock on wood). It has the ability to climb tall mountains in a single bound! I just love it!
My wife drives a Honda Element and I ride the train to work every day. I still miss my 1998 4-runner though, had to take the poor bastard out behind the barn and put her down a couple of years ago, 650,000 miles finally caught up.
Yes, Detroit very badly damaged the American Auto Industry with a nasty combination of intentional planned obsolescence, cost cutting measures, and management/labor battles which lowered productivity making attention to detail and careful manufacture a thing of the past. Most of the American cars from the 70's on were terrible and didn't last. At first Americans put up with it out of habit and few options. But when the Japanese started making better cars and Euro imports increased, many customers were lost for life. Some of those cars were nasty bad pieces of shit that didn't last 50,000 miles. What a joke.
I do a lot of work for a company that remanufactures GM parts. Business really sucks in the past few years. Some of that was the declining sales from the bailout/crash, but a huge portion of that is just that stuff doesn't break anymore. After decades of talk about improving quality, they actually are doing it finally.
Holy cow, 650,000 miles?! That's impressive. What'd you do in that thing? That's like 120 miles a day of driving. I have a 2000 Elantra. Has only about 83,000 miles. And then we got a 2011 corolla. Not a big fan of cars, in general. We're the sort of ride it until it dies family. Don't care much for driving, really.
I can see that my post doesn't make clear that, yes, overall quality has improved significantly with the American manufacturers, a trend that started in the 90's I think. The Japanese continued to get better, but the Americans have closed the gap. The era of the 70's made 5 year old junkers is long over.
Yeah, I wasn't arguing. I'm just saying the improvement in quality I've seen in the past 5 years is fairly akin to the quality improvements we saw from the 1970's to the 1990's. Just seems much more well-designed in general. Setting aside foreign vs domestic, just in general cars are really amazing these days. You can take a basic Chevy Cruze and it probably has nicer features, better handling, and is more reliable than practically any car from the 1980's.
The next time i'm shopping for a new car, I will look at American cars again, especially Ford. I will also look at Japanese cars and I might even consider Korean. Love the Euro cars, but I will likely be in a price range that is not suited for Audi, unless I go used. Years and years the American cars sucked, and now that everything points to them being competitive again in quality, price, mpg, suspension, power, turning and all the other variables, I would like to give them a shot at gaining me as a customer. But it's not guaranteed.
I recently drove the new Ford "Exploder" for two weeks whilst doing field work in some pretty varied country in Northern Idaho and I can say that I would seriously consider purchasing one after that experience. Great freeway vehicle and it did well on some of the god-awful mountain roads we were moving over.
2000 PT Cruiser. It's a piece of crap, but it was my Dad's and I'm gonna drive it until the wheels fall off. EDIT: I'll probably end up in a Chevy Malibu or a Dodge Magnum, depending on my financial situation when the Wookeemobile bites the dust...
I went to check out some apartments that I'm looking at renting for law school in NOLA, and I used Google Map street view to see what they looked like. Funny thing, I typed in my old address from 2-3 years ago as an undergrad, and they still haven't updated it. My old car's right in front of the house to the left, the black Mustang - http://maps.google.com/maps?bav=on....a=X&ei=tT-4UeiDJIeG9QSG2oDYCw&ved=0CCoQ8gEwAA Lots of nostalgia from that imagery... great times... some of the Mardi Gras parades ran right in front of our house... could see the Superdome from my bedroom window...
