Quote:
Originally Posted by jamesqf
I know I've said this before, but I think it bears repeating. The quality issues, though important, were and are far from the whole story. It's really simple: if GM or Ford or Chrysler wants me to even think about buying one of their cars, they first have to build the kind of car I want to buy. THEN I'll start looking at things like quality and price, but if they don't build it, I'm not even interested in looking.
Now what I want, and what a lot of other Americans apparently want (judging from the fact that the Japanese & Germans sell us a lot of this kind of car), is small, nimble, and good on gas. No reason they can't build cars like this: the Japanese do it, and in America. They just don't WANT to. They'd rather spend millions on advertising to convince people they really want those big gas-guzzlers, instead of spending the same amount on R&D to build better cars.
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Full size pickups are still VERY popular here, even when gas was $4.00 a gallon- they just parked their trucks longer. Many here use pickup trucks for work trucks, many work at small businesses and have many tools, maybe the need to travel up some steep dirt roads or tow something dealing with their work- now I can understand THOSE pickup truck drivers. But we also have a large group of good ole boys and gals here that will only drive a full size truck, often a 4x4 because they want the power to go off-road here and to make it to work during bad weather days, especially in our winters because Ky has little in snow removal hardware. I figure front wheel drive has a place in snow though.
Honestly I live in a part of the country in which GM cars are still the majority on the road. I admit, it is slowly changing and I am seeing more Toyotas than Hondas, which I do not believe is in sync with the rest of the country is it? Either way we likely have 4 to one Domestic cars to imported cars/trucks in the city near me. I might take a picture of our typical city traffic and show you. One could never tell that Japan was selling so many cars based on what is on the road here, and we even have a Toyota plant in Georgetown Ky. So whenever I hear the argument that GM does not build cars people want I look at the cars on the road here, and the majority are GM, and the vast majority are cars/trucks from the "Big 3" American car companies. ---
Of course we all know that Kentucky lags the rest of the country. While the rest of the country is making smoking weed legal Kentucky is still growing deadly tobacco, which many smoke and chew/dip here, and they are still chasing down moonshiners in dry counties in which it is against local law to sell or "bootleg" any form of alcohol. Heard of The Dukes of Hazzard? The FACT IS the tv show was named after Hazard (one "Z") Kentucky, not Georgia as they claim in the show. The people behind the tv show did not want to offend the people near Hazard Ky so they added a "Z" and stuck it in Georgia. Truth is it's a real place with plenty of wild people not too far away from here. Oh, in case of having closed containers of alcohol in a dry county, you are allowed to have alcohol for personal use, but sometimes the police in the dry counties might claim a few cases of beer is evidence of bootlegging- or selling alcohol in a dry county, and in many cases it is possible a person is stocking up for a party or trying to save gas by making fewer trips to the liquor store. - Myself, I no longer consider myself a drinker. But it does go to show how backwards things are in this state. And that maybe why we still have a majority of GM cars on the road here, I would never guess they had a problem if I based their car sales on what I see here, and we see plenty of NEW cars from GM sold here too. We may be the last place in the country like this though, and it is slowly changing here.