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Originally Posted by akcapeco
Til the $4.00 gasoline cast its recent sobering light on our situation, most Americans would walk right past that Mini and enjoy their Taurus, F-150 etc.
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Yet the Mini sold well long before the advent of $4 gas, and so did a lot of those other small
fun imports. That's what the US automakers don't do: they don't make & sell small cars that are fun. Their attitude seems to be that small cars are for those who can't afford better right now, and the buyers will be moving up to the big SUV as soon as they can.
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An Aveo... fundamentally decent, modest as it may seem... but which provides a hundred times more content, value and engineering prowess than almost any car offered three decades before... is called crappy.
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But is it fun? Is it cute? Is it nimble? Nope. It's stodgy, and looks like it was squished from the sides and squirted out the top, like a loaf of bread baked in a too-small pan.
Suppose you took those well-engineered Aveo internals, put them inside a Miata-like body (which itself was a knockoff of a Lotus, IIRC), and sold the result for a few thousand more than whatever the Aveo's MSRP is. I think you'd sell a heck of a lot more of them.