Monday Mileage Champion: Crossing The Bridge Of Vehicular Death

What makes an owner trade in their car?

This may not be a question for the ages. But the impact this question has on every automaker will very well determine their long-term successes and failures.

After all, manufacturers want you to become an evangelist for their chosen brand. Billions of advertising dollars can be hurled at the general public in an endless cacophony of overt and nuance ridden ways. But in the end, it’s the good graces and big mouths of us current owners that carries the most sway. No clever hamster, truck loving dog, or clueless celebrity can approach the collective influence of the word of mouth.

Your opinion matters most, bar none… and now with the potential of over 300,000 surveys and data sets to tabulate, I may need a bit of help with it all.

What I’m asking for is not help with the raw collection of all that data. One of our frequent commenters is pulling it all into a database as we speak and has reserved a web site tentatively titled tradeinqualityindex.com to display it all.

The help we need is with figuring out three questions. Specifically, if you were to trade-in your own vehicle, what three questions would you want the automaker to ask you?

Now asking a question such as, “Why didn’t you put a damn ashtray in the Neon?”, may seem rather pointless. But it’s not. Far from it. Automakers are always trying to figure out where they can attract a niche and maybe, perhaps, the theme of that question is something worth everyone’s time.

So don’t worry about offering a generic, “Did you like the car?”. Have fun. Be creative. It’s Monday after all. Let us know the three questions you would like to have an automaker ask you when parting company with your long loved creme puff or virulently reviled shitbox.