Unfortunately, most people are stupid and close-minded. If someone gets burned by a particular make or model, it is very possible for them to take the ensuing resentment to their grave. And that will include telling anyone who will listen to their tale of woe in an effort to sway them to their opinion.

Most people are also self-absorbed.

It’s not an intelligent way to decipher whether a given vehicle is truly good or not.

If a person really wants to figure out if a given vehicle has what it takes, they should read the feedback from hundreds of people who have actually owned and driven it. There are countless sites on the web which provide this service, and visiting everything from ‘review sites’ to ‘enthusiast sites’ should give you a far better understanding of a given vehicle.

The real results may surprise you far more than the fan boy cheerleading or the hate spawning drivel that passes for an intelligent opinion.

I’m a GM man, myself. I’m no loyality though; my runaround is a Mazda3. Cadillac is my favorite car brand (for what reason, I really don’t know – I’ve liked them since I was a kid!) and I’m young enough to not remember the horrible 70s (though my dad has told horror stories – a Ford man, ironically) AND am lucky enough to have not been burned by a GM product. That probably puts me in a minority!

The recipe for failure goes something like this: start with some truly horrible products, add in indifferent/nasty service experiences, and the owner will become disgruntled with your company. He may forgive your faults once, or even twice, but eventually he WILL head for greener pastures!

I’m 26, come from a GM family. My old man used to build hydra-matics, my uncle and grandfather both were GM workers from age 18 until retirement. I grew up driving GM hand-me downs from family. Despite my lineage as a GM kid, the company is effectively dead to me.

In my short driving life (8 years), I have been stranded no fewer than 6 times along the side of the road due to mechanical failures in my vehicles. Every time this has happened, I have been behind the wheel of a GM vehicle. Just yesterday, my girlfriend calls me when I’m out of town on business, saying that her Saturn won’t start and that she has to walk 40 minutes to work.

I will be buying my first “real” new car in the next couple months. I will not even consider buying a GM vehicle due to strong memories about blowing fuel pumps on I-196 (twice), transmission failure on I-69 in a February snowstorm, complete engine failure on the Ohio Turnpike. These were all well-maintained vehicles with under 100k on the odometer. Totally serious – I keep the local towing company on my cell phone’s speed dial. I’ve been conditioned to expect my vehicles to fail at any time for any reason.

The last of the GM loyalists are those of my parents’ generation. Myself and my friends have been stranded far too many times to risk spending our hard earned dollars for inferior products. Despite the fact that GM is responsible for a portion of my extended family’s employment, I simply cannot afford to throw money in the toilet on another GM vehicle.

-Ken

Very little cost to get back into the game.

VW sells older designs around the world. Int he South Africa you can buy the VW Rabbit from the 80s. In South America you can buy the VW from the 70s. Both vehicles have had some updates but nothing too expensive.

Of course the magazine writers would blast them for releasing an old product but if Chrysler was up front about what they were doing – selling a car whose design was long ago paid for, with better quality (improve the materials a little – better hardware so the doors last longer, the tranny lasts longer, the engine lasts longer), and maybe even a cost reduction.

AOn another note – an advantage to buying a used car is that they have a track record which allows you to see where it’s weaknesses are. Visit the enthusiast forums where you can see what people talk about breaking on their cars most often.

Lastly I’ve done the European compact car thing now for several years. It has been cheap with the aid of the internet. The dealer prices are stratospheric but I can get aftermarket parts and OEM parts in some cases cheap. Even with it’s “issues” (relative to my Honda) it’s only costing me a few hundred a year in repairs with my labor. I can usually wait until several things pile up and then do them all at once. This time will be a clutch cable, power steering pump, a/c clutch bearing, power steering hose, and some little plastic things that have worn like seat slider bushings. I should be done until middle of next year.

One problem I see with some domestic cars is that they are mostly sold here – not like a world product Civic that sells well everywhere. The parts seem to be available for many more years than say a blower motor for a North America market only vehicle. There isn’t likely anyone outside of the USA making parts for NA Cavaliers but the whole world is making parts for the VW Golf family of vehicles.

BTW, how many “quotes” can one use in one article? :)

http://money.cnn.com/2007/01/26/news/companies/pluggedin_taylor_ford.fortune/index.htm

That seems to back my numbers fairly well.

Also, if they were making such a good profit on the neon… why’d they kill it and replace it with the Caliber? You don’t see Honda killing the Civic. Just classic Big 3 stupidity?

I once figured that an E class was a better deal over ten years than two Fords, adding depreciation to the mix.

Every time (not too many) my BMW needs a part, I justify the cost with the idea that it is designed for a 200 k + service life. So far, that has been the truth.

I went through a few detroit cars….they last 75k.

I am quite sure I have read that GM puts the least labor into its vehicles… something like 20 hours per car. Their hourly costs are higher but surely not twice the competition. I’d expect the labor cost comparison is more along the lines of:

GM – 20 hrs * $100/hr = $2000
Toyonda – 22 hrs * $66/hr = $1452

Or, GM is disadvantaged by a mere $550 or so. Considering that, per a TTAC article from last year or so, 40% of Americans still won’t consider an Asian car, this isn’t a crippling cost difference. With a solid 40% of the market unwilling to consider an Asian car, Detroit should be able to charge slightly more per car. Of course, 25% of buyers now won’t consider an American car but that’s a more recent development (I expect 15 years ago, this tilt was 80/10 in favor of Detroit).

I don’t see labor cost as the big problem.

I simply do not care how much GM improves its quality/products! They did not care about the consumers that bought their death traps in the past, so why should I care that they are now on the verge of bankruptcy? GM could start churning out the best vehicles on the planet, but I would never, ever give them a penny of mine. Automakers really should put an effort into their entry level vehicles, because young buyers really are impressionable and they have years of car buying ahead of them.

Say the margin on a small car is $500. I think that is generous.

Say Honda just gave GM the right to build the Fit as the Chevy Flab. Honda sells the base Fit for 16000. $500 margin, the Fit costs 15500 to make.

GM builds the Flab at its Oshawa plant. With its added labor costs (around $2500 per car), the Flab costs $18000 to make. Tack on that $500 profit, and the Flab is running @ 18500 (for that kind of cash you could move up a segment over at Honda).

GM can’t compete by building good cars in the small market. It has to build crappy penalty boxes because that is the only way they can compete on price. Which feeds into their cultural hatred of small cars; if you knew you had to build a crappy car for that segment, you’d hate building them too.

If you are going to the dealer, then you are, as I said, over paying everytime. Besides that, most of the dealers own both a foriegn and domestic. I don’t expect that they are any different, but I could be wrong. I only go to a dealer to get parts.

OTOH, the fix it yourself european car thing really can work. I had a coworker who was a Jag fan. He drove old jags for next to nothing, and enjoyed tinkering with them on weekends. It’s one way to make a fancy car affordable.

Exactly. GM et al have historically failed their new buyers by concentrating their development efforts on high-margin vehicles at the expense of their low-margin stuff.

Nothing, but nothing, will chase away a buyer more than owning a product that feels like it’s maker put it together out of spite, which is exactly how an Aveo feels next to a Fit, Versa or even Yaris. They’re not bad cars, but compared to the CTS, Corvette or GMT900 trucks, let alone the Malibu, you can tell GM just doesn’t want to make them.

Interestingly, this is why GM turned to Daewoo in the first place: GM wasn’t culturally capable of making a decent small car, where Daewoo was entirely geared for bang-for-the-buck. If you cast back your mind to 2003, the Aveo really wasn’t that bad next to the Echo, Accent and Rio and was certainly better, in holistic terms, than the Cavalier of the time. But GM, being GM, didn’t improve the Aveo at all, and it’s getting creamed by the Fit, Yaris and Versa.

I don’t hold out a lot of hope for the Cruze. Despite the press-release puff photos of the interior, it’s yet another car made to a low-margin price point by a company that hates low-margin products. Cultural shifts are not something this company does well.

Parts for both American and Japanese cars are dirt cheap, and the Japanese design their mainstream American cars to be worked on by “bubba” at the independent service station.

European parts are slightly more, but in this age of efficient logistics and eBay they can be had very cheaply. The bigger problem is having the repairs done. Repairs on old European cars are not intuitive to “bubba” and require special knowledge. This means expensive, specialized service on everything from alignments on up.

If one is willing to put a two post lift in their garage and spend time hunting for special tools on eBay then an old European car can work.

Simply look at all the 20-30yr olds that are buying Cobalt’s and Aveo’s because they want a fuel saving vehicle. These buyers will get the full frontal assault from the GM dealers, GM build “quality”, and horrible resale. They will NOT be moving up to the next refresh of the Malibu or other sedan GM will have.

By putting crap vehicles into the hands of the next generation, GM is cementing their place in history.

So my conclusion is that the domestics go to the shop more often, and each trip is a chance for graft.

Oh yes indeed! If I were to buy a used car today, I’d STILL avoid GM, for precisely this reason.

To Cwallace: No cartoon girls making out on my page. Instead, there’s a vampire/zombie girl. Not really my type!

I had a great private garage for years, but the owner must have decided its getting time to retire because the prices doubled, and the amount of BS being fed by the writers tripled. I caught them trying to take my mom for an extra $500 on a $1,000 repair.

So my conclusion is that the domestics go to the shop more often, and each trip is a chance for graft. They can be bargains for folks who fix their own, or at least know enough not to get taken, but the rest of the country is learning a different lesson.

One of my friends had a troublesome Detroiter some years ago and, while I didn’t at all mind giving her a lift back and forth to the incompetent dealer, she really hated to impose. Yet another reason why people don’t like owning unreliable cars. She drives a Honda, now. Reliability was her #1 reaason for the switch. Sort of too bad from my perspective because she paid for the rides with home-made bread.