There is some truth to that. The Neon made it’s debut not at the Detroit, Chicago, or NY auto shows but at the Franfurt or Geneva show in Europe. It’s 2.0 liter engine was designed with displacement taxes that other countries place on larger engines. And it was designed to be built in right and left had drive versions. The engine was developed by Chrysler but it had it’s exhaust manifolds facing the front of the car like the typical Mitsubishi arrangement (Mitsu used the engine in it’s Eclipse sport coupe). But it was not based off a Mitsubishi design. A 1.8 liter version was also made for export markets.

Doesn’t matter how long it was sold; what matters is whether it was easily adaptable to driving conditions in other countries. The Model T met that criteria.

Door latches and glass are not “minor trim items”, they are regulated and tested by various government bodies. So is the door structure and the door handles. So, the short answe5r to you question is, yes, all these parts have to be different.

So many other parts, like seats, aree different because of differnet tastes in different continents.

I don’t belive that Europeans are superior to US buyers, just different.Is this a good thing or bad? Neither.

The point is that successful cars are never “world” cars, it just seems that way to the uninformed.

As always, the key to success inthe car business is making cars that people want to buy, no matter where they are made or sold.

Bob

While I agree with many things you said, the Ghia package is simply horrible in it’s tastelessness. Acres of fake wood. Do I need to say more? Ghia is for grandpa, everybody else takes the Titanium package.

Europeans also prefer more hatchbacks, small cars and diesels.

Oh really?

Wait, let’s look out of the window: There’s my shiny new small diesel hatchback.

You’re probably right.

The Model-T was the first world car

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_T

Sorry, the car idea was mine, however I did NOT say the car would be carbon fiber or ultra light.

Lovins comments were about making our cars, trucks, homes, planes, and business about 3 times more efficient than they are and Lovins said that the technology exists now to do this and if we use that technology we won’t have to buy any foreign oil or drill for any more oil.

Lovins also said that oil companies DON’T want to drill on the north slope of Alaska or along our coast! The expense is very great, there would be little profit AND the Alaskan Pipe Line is at the end of its useful life and will require great expense to keep it repaired. AND the pipe line is extremely vulnerable to attack.

My comments were meant to open minds up about imagining totally different kinds of cars. Maybe they will be made of carbon fiber with electric motors or maybe cheese cloth impregnated with Elmer’s glue with fly wheel motors we wind up with wind power at night.

Lovins also said (sorry not his exact words) that our present ICE’s have to be extremely powerful because 80% of their energy is used to make heat and noise and we only get the remaining 20% to move us around.

The various markets around the world are sufficiently different that it took GM 18 months to Pontiac-ize the Aussie Holden Monaro. If it was just a nose job… And GM says they “fast-tracked” it. Can you imagine the time lag had they went about it at a normal pace?

Didn’t Donald Petersen intend to have all Ford products engineered to global requirements? Bet once he left the building the luddite NIHs in Dearborn (and Koln, to be fair) nuked that idea as fast as possible. Alex Trotman went about it in a slightly different fashion, but the results were largely the same.

All the world’s car companies might be better off if all the world agreed to a single set of “major” regulations (safety, emissions, etc.) while letting their local divisions handle the local styling and trivia/minutiae requirements.

Lastly, if it was slightly cleaner looking and was named “Ford Sierra” instead of “Merkur” and if it wasn’t sold by LM dealers, betcha it would have sold in reasonable numbers. Loved the XR4Ti’s biplane spoiler!

Ah, the holy grail of Mass Customization. Contrary to all predictions from the past several decades, it has so far come to almost nothing. You still can’t get a custom pair of jeans at a reasonable price let alone something many orders of magnitude more complex like an automobile. Dell is struggling in the PC market because cookie-cutter PC producers are finally beating one-at-a-time custom configurations from Dell.

I’m 48 and hope to live a long time, and I’m pretty sure I will not see the custom automobile.

I would love to be able to simply custom configure my next car and have it show up at the dealership within a month, but the sales culture in the US is so heavily invested in selling off-the-lot that even this very reasonable expectation is likely to continue to be dashed.

Dynamic88: “The Model-T ?”

Not even close. The Model T was sold “only” for 19 years. However the 1960’s Fiat 124 in all of its forms was quite a world car: it was built in Italy, Spain, Egypt, India, South Korea and of course Russia, where it’s produced even today as a Lada.

Relton, “I am intimately familiar with both the US and European Focuses ca 2000, and I can definitively state that there are fewer than 10% shared parts between the 2. The Focus is not a world car. It is 2 cars that share a few exterior components.
For example, the door skin is the same, but non of the other door components are the shared. Latches, hinges, glass, window regulators, handles, trim are all different.
The entire structure of the car forward of the windshield is completely different, as are the engines and transmissions.”

My question so is this a good thing? Whether its Toyota or Ford , are the markets so different that door latches and minor trim items must be designed differently for the European and American markets?

that boring car in rs500 form (450+) was the car to have in the mid 80 European touring car championships.
Even won the Japanese touring car champs 87 & 88, it had M3’s for mid afternoon snack.
Great car even in just rs form. 204hp in 87 wasn’t bad from a 2.0. in comparison the best a mustang had was 179hp

its incorrectly labeled in the picture as a murker xr*&$HG*^$^wHo cares

Hmmm, as good as Lovins sounds, there’s a huge flaw in his proposal. His ultra-light prototype car is made out of carbon fiber. In addition to being expensive, it’s utterly un-recyclable. How environmental is that?

So, I would contend that a valid observation may have been: the 2000 Focus met the standards of design, value and utility, but it failed the reliabilty test with 10 recalls in the first year, a testament to internal politics and engineering failures. However, with Ford’s climb in the quality metrics (I’m sure that four different sources can’t ALL be wrong) and Mulally at the helm, there is hope that the 2011 Focus is exactly what we’ve been hoping for.

History is good to read, so we don’t make the same mistakes over again but what is coming is going to be so different and so amazing.

We will be designing our own cars on our own computers. The designs will go to small local machine shops that will cut our cars out of blocks of epoxy with machine tools that operate like 3 dimensional printers.

The days of burning oil to make mostly heat and noise and a tiny bit of power to move forward are coming to an end.

Charlie Rose interviewed Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute yesterday and he said we now have the technology to make our cars so efficient that we wouldn’t need ANY foreign oil.

Huge auto factories will soon be dinosaurs.

As long as you are busy discussing who makes the best heavy ugly crap the auto companies can keep selling this crap to you.

When Toyota created Scion, they believed that the fairly normal-looking xA would sell twice as well as the funky, boxy xB. So, they made initial production plans accordingly.

Of course, what actually happened was the xB sold twice as well as the xA. Opps. So, clearly, at least in the short term, they had a surplus of xAs.

Now, if this happened to Ford or GM or Chrysler, they would have to dump thousands of dollars on the hood of the xAs to blow them out. But Toyota doesn’t think that way.

Suddenly, seemingly overnight, a “Toyota xA” appeared in a half dozen Middle Eastern markets. Supply problem solved. Keep in mind that the Japanese market name for the car was the Toyota ist, not the Toyota xA. Clearly, they merely sent cars originally planned to be sent to the US to the Middle East, after swapping the Scion badges with Toyota ones.

Toyota is “world flexible” enough that they can do things like this, so every dark cloud has a very large silver lining. GM, Ford, and Chrysler, well, aren’t.

The problem has been with the execution. It seems that Detroit misunderstands its own customers so much that it views them as cartoon characters, rather than as real people with tastes and wants.

Detroit seems to believe that Americans only buy small cars when they are too broke to buy something bigger. Therefore, the small car buyer is expected to quietly accept his plight by buying a rolling penalty box until he can do better. It’s a compromise, and beggars can’t be choosers.

If the 4-banger sucks, too bad — you shoulda had a V8, so until then, deal with it. If the interior sucks, too bad — you’ll get a (slightly) better one when you can afford a Buick or a Lincoln. If it’s ugly, too bad — styling costs money.

Toyota and Honda changed the US market because quality came standard with every model, instead of being an expensive option. Finesse and high tech cost money, but reliability and fit-and-finish became standard equipment.

When customers realized that good things could come in small packages after all, they bought from those who delivered the best small packages. When those same companies started selling bigger, more expensive packages, the customers knew from their previous experiences with the smaller ones that the larger ones would not disappoint. Before you knew it, you had the parent’s Lexus parked in the driveway next to the kid’s Toyota.

The Japanese have gone out of their way to Americanize their products and have been rewarded handsomely for it. They understood, better than anyone in Detroit, what proper Americanization was all about. Detroit could have easily lead the way, had they just understood their own countrymen.

Of all the Japanese companies, the models that are not made in the US yet sold in the US and other countries are still similiar around the world. Such as the Jazz/Fit, various Mazda and Nissan models, the Yaris, etc…

In regards to the Mazda3, I would say that is Ford’s closest thing to a “world car”. There is a plethora of powertrain options in various markets, trim levels, and different features. And alot of it is plug-n-play hardware with little to no wiring. Obviously there are also items that would require a bit more change. No different than a Mercedes, BMW, or Volvo that is manufactured in Europe and sold around the world.

Maybe we should just say that Ford’s C1 platform is the closest there comes to a domestic companies’ “world car” as you could include several Ford products, Mazda products, and Volvo products.

The Model-T ?

Another interesting tidbit is the thing about different safety standards. One reason that the japanese makers make three different version for the JDM/Europe/US markets is that the different standards make loopholes for different solutions. European versions is better made, with more and better safety features, more weldspots, and so on. And they are accordingly more expensive than the versions sold in the U.S. I don’t know if this is true, perhaps someone in the know has something to say on the matter?

Yep, this is the sort of sub-optimization that Bill
Ford realized he couldn’t overcome so he recruited Alan Mullaly.

Robert, did you actually read it all? I say that GM and Ford moving to world cars “is obvious and belated”. I think its a good move. That’s the gist of my editorial. With the caveat: the cars have to avoid the “Americanization” pitfalls that Detroit consistently fell for in the past: cheap interiors and other parts, iffy quality, taste-less styling changes, etc.

Bring on the world cars! The Cobalt should have been the Astra all along. The Focus should have been the Euro Focus. Execution is the key.

As for Euro cars being taken to the US – whatever the guys at the top say, the local engineers, marketeers and stylists have to ‘protect’ their part of the empire (even as it falls apart), and ‘tweak’ the import for US tastes – despite FMCs new drive to get the Fiesta & Focus to NA, I’ll bet they’re different to the ones the rest of the world gets – and of course that ‘localisation engineering’ has to be paid for. The alternative to import direct from Europe – look at the Saturn Astra – how much does GM make on each one (maybe the creative beanies tried to justify that program as a tax offset – ooops, silly me, the General doesn’t make any money to pay tax on).