Quote:
Originally Posted by jamesqf
I'm not basing my opinion on anything but my own observations (which I freely admit are hardly a scientifically-controlled survey), and public information such as lists of top vehicles traded in under C4C. So what are you basing your opinion on, anything better? Got any sort of objective measure of quality, such as say average mileage before junking, or average repair costs to 200K miles or so?
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My first 3 cars were all american, all late 70's and 80's, and all ran perfectly with over 200,000 miles on them.
2 of them were Chrysler Aspen variants, both with 225 Slant 6's, and the third was a '89 Olds Delta 88, with the Chevy 5.7 Diesel (which they should have kept on the damned assembly lines.)
The Olds was far from remarkable in terms of reliability, but once you got the hang on checking things periodically, you could easily keep up with it to the extent that it was only a matter of time, not spending butt-loads of money on maintenance and repairs.
When I said that reliability is a function of vehicle maintenance, I meant it exactly that way. I didn't mean it would cost you any less or more than another type of car, I meant that if you don't maintain your crap, it's going to be crap. If you keep up with your ride, it'll stay nice.
Maintenance costs are a function of availability and manufacturer pricing, so even those are relative. Cost of ownership is based, in part at least, on both of those parameters... How soon will something need maintenance, and how much will that maintenance cost? But Cost of Ownership isn't the issue here, is it?
Adding to the "reliability" of american built vehicles, there's a Ford F-150 in my yard that hasn't had oil added (or changed) all summer, and it smokes like crazy every time you start it.. (used to anyway, either it fixed itself, or ran out of oil... don't really care which). We've been using it to pull trailers around the yard, move inoperative cars, and generally as a work vehicle, gathering wood and such for the home. It stopped smoking about 3 weeks ago, and has since had about 30 hours of run time... it still starts up every time. Before it was used for this purpose, it was a DD for a friend of mine, and had approx 130k put on it, IIRC, with no major issues. When it started leak oil onto the header, from the valve cover of the 300 inline 6 cylinder, he sold it to my Father for a small fee and we started using it for a work truck. Sure, it's rusty.. but it's also a 1979 F150... it's bound to have SOMETHING wrong.
Try doing that with a Toyota Tundra.