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Old 06-27-2012, 10:40 AM   #107 (permalink)
Vman455
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jamesqf View Post
Sure, but you do know that Honda still makes & sells cars smaller than the Accord, don't you? Honda (and other imports) got their foothold in the US market by serving the small car segment that the US automakers were ignoring. That might be - at a guess - 25% of the total market. Once the imports saturated that segment (and were competing amongst themselves for shares of it), they could gain more sales by building larger models as well. That didn't mean that the small car segment went away: it meant that they were taking a share of the mid-size market segment away from Detroit.
Of course--and you do know that so do the Big Three, and have for decades, don't you? My point was that, regardless of how the Japanese manufacturers entered the market here 50+ years ago, their once-small cars have grown just as much (if not more) than domestic vehicles, reflecting the trend of Americans and the world in general wanting "big, bigger, and even bigger" cars when these cars have more physical problems to overcome in order to get decent fuel economy.
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