Usually I just use this to vent / avoid work, but I’m glad that some of my comments are valuable. Thanks.

The worst thing was that until the crash in October, lunch cost twice as much. The UK Pound was over valued at $2, it is less overvalued now that it is $1.50.

The other factor is that they charge a VAT (sales tax) that I think makes up about 17.5% of the price add-on e.g. a 2.00 item costs 2.35 at the register.

“One of Detroit’s biggest problems is schizophrenia. Multiple platforms for the same kind of car, switching back and forth between FWD and RWD, and when they finally perfect things they kill them.

They finally fixed a lot of the Corvair’s flaws, and then killed it; they perfected the Fiero, and then killed it. ”

Wrong psychiatric category. Its more like ADD/HD. But it is a key problem.

* More power is somehow better, and
* Outdoing your neighbour is somehow an achievement

Those two things play to very alpha male behaviour. Generation after generation have grown up with that as a twin dimension of the Bigish3 marketing effort.

All that was easily expressed in bigger or taller cars year after year.

Weren’t VW Bettle drivers “snarled” at in the 1960s? Herbie The Love Bug probably did more for compacts than the entire marketing effort of the Bigish3 on their own small cars ever did.

Don’t even start on motorsport “marketing” – how agricultural is Nascar? How brain dead is drag racing? What brands have tried to connect themselves with that most?

Also I agree with no_slushbox and always look out for his/her comments. Thanks.

Never owned a Vega, but had three Mopar slant 6s in the day and yes, you couldn’t kill them. Had two Corvairs(check my name), loved ‘em. Had two Pintos, hated ‘em.

If you want to bring up an old “small” car you want to mention the Austin 7, sold in the US as the Bantam (the guys that built the Jeep prototype, right as they were going broke).

It’s not that simple. A damn nice compact can be done with a pushrod-4, a live rear axle and body on frame construction. If the car is developed properly and built well.

On the big-3 compacts (and full size cars) the accessories failed, the engines failed and the transmissions failed. Nothing was developed properly.

One of Detroit’s biggest problems is schizophrenia. Multiple platforms for the same kind of car, switching back and forth between FWD and RWD, and when they finally perfect things they kill them.

They finally fixed a lot of the Corvair’s flaws, and then killed it; they perfected the Fiero, and then killed it.

Instead slowly improving the front engine, RWD layout they went FWD, all the way up to Cadillac, allowing BMW and Mercedes to take the premium market.

Why did they switch to FWD? Because they thought their customers were too stupid to drive proper cars. Designing cars for stupid customers left them with only that.

GM introduced fuel injection in some cars in the 1950s, and then killed it, leaving some cars with carburetors up to the 1990s.

The early Chrysler 300s and the suicide door Continental had unibodies in the 1960s, and then the big-3 gave up and put their big cars back on frames until the big cars switched to FWD in the ’80s and ’90s.

Various GMs also had independent rear suspensions in the 1950s and early 1960s, when almost every RWD European car had a live rear axle, but that was killed also.

In GMs mind “the stupid Americans would never know the difference”, except that Americans are much smarter than the big-3 have ever given them credit for.

Detroit busied itself developing accessories (power steering and brakes, cruise control, stereo systems, etc.) and making air conditioning effective, reliable and relatively inexpensive.

And, for many years, that basic idea worked fine for the majority of buyers. American cars were affordable, durable and inexpensive to repair. American air conditioning and automatic transmissions were the best in the world. American gadgets were reliable and relatively inexpensive.

The only problem is that formula doesn’t work well in the smallest vehicles. It also doesn’t work if emissions are a concern, or the buyers want to get more than 14 mpg out of their vehicles.

But, for many years, the majority of buyers ate it up and came back for more. More buyers were looking at smaller cars in the 1960s, but the real change occurred with the passage of the Clean Air Act and the first fuel crisis. These two challenges required precision engineering, design and manufacturing, and Detroit badly botched the job.

That supports my point. On paper, there were aspects of the Vega that were innovative. I’ll put myself on a limb and say that the styling was decent for its day. The car should have worked, but fundamental design flaws and bad management decisions that prioritized cost savings over quality ensured that it would be a disaster that would forever harm the brand.

That’s the sad part of this whole thing. Even when they make the effort, Detroit still can’t do the job. Their best just isn’t good enough.

Americans want to earnestly believe that the engineering in Detroit is fine, but it isn’t. It’s subpar compared to the rest of the world. For years, they could hide it behind speed and vinyl and velour and cruise control and fuzzy dice, but when those days disappeared, so did their sales.

Reliability is largely the result of parts quality, operational management and design. Unreliable cars have inadequate parts and assembly lines that prioritize volume over quality, building bad designs. Of course the cars aren’t as good, you can’t expect them to be as good if the inputs are inferior.

Ford is in better shape and has more potential for a turnaround, because they are looking to their overseas operations to address these problems. Chrysler has none of that, and Opel lags behind Ford enough that it has a disadvantage in playing catch up.

A fuel tax is not the magic bullet you think it is. It’s an option that not only would send an already fragile US economy straight into depression, but it’ll also put an end to the career of any politician who merely breathed its approval.

The last truly decent small car to come out of Detroit was the mid-to-late sixties Chrysler A-body (Valiant/Dart). The six-cylinder/Torqueflite drivetrains were as solid as an anvil. If it weren’t for the mediocre fuel mileage and traditional Chrysler poor body integrity, most of them would still be on the road today.

I recall more than one of these with its slant six ready to soldier on for another 100,000 miles, while the body falling off as bits of brown iron oxide. I called them Hole-ly Rollers.

pch101: I’m not “tempted” to believe this, I actually know from someone designing cars in Detroit RIGHT NOW that small car design teams are starved of resources and management’s explanation is “small cars are supposed to be crappy cars.”

I don’t believe that. They really did try. They made a diligent effort to do well with such cars as the Vega, Citation and Cavalier.

I can’t let this one go by. It’s hard to come up with a list of cars where Cavalier is the best one. I must reiterate an earlier point: GM has never made a decent small car. I think most TTAC readers would vote the Vega as the worst US car since the 1920s. For all the well deserved quality gripes directed at Ford and (particularly) Chrysler from the 50s on, NOBODY brought us anything even remotely as pathetic as the Vega. The sad thing is that I believe that GM REALLY DID try. Ditto the Citation, which looks good only next to the Vega.
It is even worse when considering that in 1969-71 when the Vega was under development, GM was like the Roman Empire – it was all powerful and it was everywhere. If anybody had the resources to develop a decent small car, it was the GM of that period.
The Ford Pinto had its problems, but it was a pretty decent car, for what it was. I would take one over anything in your list of Chevrolets.

A bit of Nash trivia – In the sedan, the front seat could be reclined so that it was level with the rear seat, creating a bedroom of sorts. The trouble was most fathers with daughters were quite aware of this feature. So, if you showed up in Nash to pick up your date, chances were that her dad would have a meltdown and she would be instantly grounded.

Whatever faults they may possess, the Dodge Dart from 1963 through the 70s must have had something going for it. Here in Portland, Oregon it is far and away the most common car of that era that’s in use as a daily driver. Probably the owners don’t much care about gas mileage or body integrity. The cars just run forever.

The Dart is not really that small; the Valiant of that era was on a shorter wheelbase.

When I was growing up in Southern California in the late 50s and early 60s, it seemed that the British had their moment in the sun when it came to selling compacts in the U.S. Almost everyone on our street had a second car that was from England. We had a Hillman Husky, and there was a Sunbeam, a Vauxhall Victor, two English Fords, and a Hillman Minx. Plus sports cars; an Austin Healey and a Morgan. But then came the Japanese.

Whatever faults they may possess, the Dodge Dart from 1963 through the 70s must have had something going for it. Here in Portland, Oregon it is far and away the most common car of that era that’s in use as a daily driver. Probably the owners don’t much care about gas mileage or body integrity. The cars just run forever.

The Dart is not really that small; the Valiant of that era was on a shorter wheelbase.

When I was growing up in Southern California in the late 50s and early 60s, it seemed that the British had their moment in the sun when it came to selling compacts in the US. Almost everyone on our street had a second car from England. We had a Hillman Husky, and there was a Sunbeam, a Vauxhall Victor, two English Fords, and a Hillman Minx. Plus sports cars, an Austin Healey and a Morgan. But then came the Japanese.

Yes, VW sold a lot of bugs, but they sold them on price. The VW was a well made car for very little money. The Mini? Never got much traction here. No firsthand knowledge, but I doubt that anything british from the 60s had any better quality record than any contemporary MoPar (which is not a very high standard, and this from a big MoPar fan.)
By the early 70s the 800 pound gorilla of the subcompacts was the Toyota Corona/Corrola and the Datsun 510. Hardly groundbreaking ingenuity, these. Again, they sold on price. As with the VWs, the high quality was a side benefit that only became apparent as the years wore on.

I don’t believe that. They really did try. They made a diligent effort to do well with such cars as the Vega, Citation and Cavalier.

They just aren’t good at it. Detroit was successful when the priority was on size, style, horsepower, and options packages. They lost it when the market moved away from those.

The Big 3 were never particularly good at precision engineering or manufacturing, and they found themselves unable to compete as consumers increasingly began to prefer products that could offer quality and reliability without bulk and flash.

The nail in the coffin came from the democratization of what used to be options. Once upon a time, a car could be moved upmarket simply by putting gadgets on it. Now, every car in the market has power everything, air conditioning, decent stereos, etc. available. When it was no longer possible to distinguish a Buick from a Chevy by adding freon and a bit of color, the justification for having those additional mid-tier brands disappeared, but the brands lingered on, dying and dragging down the others with them.