Auto Industry Desperation: “Small Cars Are Disposable and Bad for the Environment”
 

The auto industry is beginning to look more and more like a crooked politician with lies and deceptive statistics. Everyone knows the industry is hurting recently: gas prices are up, vehicle miles are down, people are buying less, and people are buying smaller. All of this means that car companies are making a lot less [...]

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Are these the same morons who said a Prius would only last 109,000 miles, while a Hummer would last 379,000 miles?

Haha, probably Clev!

Hello -

The biggest joke of all is that steel is one of the most recycled products on earth, regardless of it's source :

Steel Recycling
This guy must have been selling sub-prime loans and credit default swaps in his previous job.

CarloSW2

Actually, most modern cars are pretty well built and will, if cared for, last 200k miles.

What is true though is that a "smaller, cheaper" car is not always the best choice depending on it's useage.

People who are going to keep a vehicle until the warranty runs out, and then trade them in on a new one are going to balance the initial cost of the vehicle with it's short term depreciation.

People who "drive them into the ground" are likely to be less worried about initial cost and more about the reputation for longevity and inexpensive repairs,

Most smaller "cheaper" cars do not fall well into the latter category. Partially because of reputation (think of the rep of Yugos or early Hundais) that they must contend with, and partially because the cost percentage of a repair is somewhat greater. People will tend to put a $1000 repair into a car worth $8000 well before they will put it into a car worth $3000.

I am not saying that "economy" cars are a bad choice or unreliable. These are just observations from when I was turning wrenches.

Jim

mavin is very right. being a neon owner myself, I saw some go away to the yard early from the headgasket issues. The ones that survived are still running today. There are some buttugly first gens out there, some completely paintless. That stuff chips off in chunks. I see the same paint problem with chevy trucks. It also depends on the consumer, some people see a headgasket as the kiss of death, I see it as an excuse to modify :)

In the Honda CiViC world - with their open-deck engine design - it's the Kiss of Death for the engine, but NOT the car!

It's a well documented fact that replacing a head gasket in a Honda is a total waste of money, e.g. you're better off buying a replacement engine!

As you implied (ahem) it's also an excellent excuse for a hot engine swap... :thumbup:

BlackDeuceCoupe you are right on the money! but really I have no heard of many honda d series head gasket issues. In comparison with Saturn and GM with their lost foam casting cylinder head (porosity problems) and first gen neons there are hardly any d series head gasket issues.
I have personally overheated a d series on several occasions and never had an issue.

My dad is an engine machinist and probably has done more cylinder head reconditioning than anyone else in Canada has seen more 2.8/3.1/3.4 GM V6 cyl heads, Saturn/GM ECOTEC heads, and Neon heads than he could shake a stick at, his shop does all the dealer heads in London Ont. I could go on about what engines he sees alot of but one that he does not see are Honda engines, and if he does the honda heads are so nice that they usually do not even need to have 0.030" planed to take the warp out of the head surface.

Cheers!

Yep! There's NOTHING wrong with Honda head gaskets! :)

The thing is, a blown head gasket in a Honda CiViC is the net result of a lot of other problems, e.g. the head gasket is usually last thing to go, not the first - and by then, the rest of the motor is owned. Sure, you can fix the head gasket, but the rods, pistons, rings, wrist-pins, blah, blah, blah, have all lost their temper (from overheating) and are shot!

Typically what happens is, you get your car running again, but now you got rod slap, leaks, blue smoke coming out the tailpipe, and all the rest of it.

LoL!

Then, the head gasket goes again... or a rod blows, et cetera.

You're just way ahead of the game replacing the whole motor - and it's cheaper! ;)

I would really like to see some statistics on this. I know I see a lot of '80s and early '90s Honda Civics & CRXs on the roads, as well as Toyota pickups of the same age. (Heck, I OWN an '88 Toyota, and drove a CRX before buying my Insight.) So it ought to be fairly easy to e.g. pull out current registration numbers for those and see what percentage of those sold are still on the roads, and compare the result with some of those larger models.

PS: A quick check of the local Craigslist, for the first week of October. I looked for 1980s pickups: there were 4 Fords, average asking price $2380; 1 Chevy, $7900 (but the guy sounds like a real optimist :-)); and 7 Toyotas, $3742 average. More Toyotas than Ford & Chevy combined, at a higher average price.

Ecomodders are smarter than to fall for that BS. Piles of data to support the contrary.

RH77

I love that quote, from the link in the OP...

Hahahaha!

The Honda CiViC is the #1 selling car in America and only depreciate about $800/yr... :D

Honda Civic Now America's Best-Selling Vehicle - U.S. News Rankings and Reviews

Actually, there is a whole lot more to the cars being thought of as "disposable" than just the engine. A lot go by the wayside when the transmission starts slipping. Of course, most people have never changed the trans filter/fluid in the entire time they have owned the car, and will compain about the cost of a re-build. Also, smaller cars are generally built to be lighter, so use thinner metal on many parts that rusts through more quickly than a heavier car. Again, if people maintain (wash/wax/repair if needed) the body, it will last longer. Note: still not forever...when the frame rusts through, there are some safety issues to examine. Another one that is common, is that people with "cheaper" cars will tend to let little things go. And yes, I have seen it here as well. If the AC is out and it will be $400 to repair, they will let it go and just roll down the windows or remove the belt. Or the power windows go out and they will think it too costly to repair. If the care was not thought of as "disposable"....they would spend the money and time to fix it.

There is some financial sense to be had as well. My general rule is that when a single repair will exceed the book value of the car, it is time for it to go. Since I do 95% of my own wrenching, this is not too often, but it has happened in the past. When My metro got totaled, even if I had bought it back as salvage and chosen to repair the damage, I would have been upside down in the value of the car for more than 40K miles. The value was to look for something else....hence the neon. Was the metro "disposable"....in this case, it might be looked at that way.

Had my pickup sustained the same $$$ amount of damage, it would have been repaired since the cost would only have been a fraction of the value of the truck.

There is some common sense involved too :)

Jim

Jamesqf, the toyota 22RE or 22R 4 cyl engine is probably the most durable toyota GAS engine made. I stress GAS ;) because they have some wicked diesels B and 3B come to mind.

Top Gear did a super abusive test to a hilux truck
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lrk6vsb77xk

HOWEVER 3VZ-E the V6 toyota truck engines have quick the known head gasket problems in earlier years.

Two of my 2.8s had blown headgaskets. The one in the Celeb went after the radiator blew out on the freeway. The one in the 6000 wagon was like that when I bought it, but I knew the guy and a blown out radiator caused that one too. The Celeb made a nice excuse to put in a 3.1, more torque and a few better mpg. Would have done that with the 6000 but I couldnt pass up a local 78k 2.8 on ebay for $50, it ran like new.

Others summed this up pretty well. This article also made me think of whats been going on in the towing world, but for the same reason, more profit margin on larger vehicles. Other parts of the world tow safely with smaller vehicles, which many times are more efficient and better handling with a reasonable load behind it than a larger vehicle. But vehicles sold here have much lower tow ratings, sometimes for the same vehicle. The automakers want to you to buy a full size pickup or SUV to tow anything these days.

Well, except for that little problem with the timing chain, where if the tensioner goes the engine keeps on running just fine, until the chain chews through the aluminum housing into a water passage :-( Happened to me, with the '84 pickup I had before the '88. (Rebuilt the engine, though, and drove it several more years before I got tired of trying to get the carbed engine to pass the county smog check.)

As for towing, maybe the solution is to re-think just what you need to tow. Haul a couple of kayaks or a small catamaran instead of a large power boat, burn less gas, and have more fun. Even a big tent, camp stove, and all the rest will fit in the average trunk, so why tow a 30 foot trailer?

Yea I forgot about the timing chain issue.
Then there is that darn bolt hidden in the puddle of oil at the front of the head!

As for boats why not have a sailboat ;)

So, disposing of the little cars will somehow make them environmentally friendly?

There's a GIGANTIC carbon load invested in making that little car. Wouldn't the environmentally-smartest treatment be to run it for as long as it can be possibly made to last? I sure think so.

Take note, ecomodders all over this site are shocking Metros back to life and running them way, way beyond their sell-by date.

Eat it, Detroit. Don't try to scare us into buying cars just because you're in the hole. That's not our fault.

Maybe if we stuck to a more modular method of production also, some good examples of this are;
1992-1995 Honda civics and 1994-2001 Acura Integras which are basically the same car
Ford Escort , Mazda Protege and 323 from 1990-?
Neons and PT Cruisers

Automakers need to focus on simple. Honda has only recently started to have "options" on their Honda Civics, and even at that you just pick Trim levels for the most part.

For me I have a problem with imported cars, I mean cars that are produced in countries because of their cheap labour. Imagine how much eco driving you have to do to compensate for the trip your Hyundai took on the ship over.

I like my 14 year old CANADIAN built Honda Civic, and it seems like many people like their CANADIAN built Metros, and Flys

I wonder, though. Suppose you're a Canadian living in Vancouver. Does it take more energy to ship a Hyundai from Korea on a cargo ship, or to ship an Ontario-built car by rail or truck? A similar question might be asked regarding Americans west of the Continental Divide or thereabouts: is it more energy-efficient to get your new Honda from Ohio or Japan? It'd be interesting to see a map of the world scaled by shipping cost rather than distances or political boundaries.

jamesqf , I totally agree, I am mostly about making a smaller environmental foot print.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxlj6fgQ-ZU

how about getting rid of steel body panels!

Like how Saturns used to be. What happened there? Hammering on the panel in the video reminded me of past Auto Shows where they would have you beat on the door of the Saturn model to test it yourself.

RH77

Has that changed? My '04 Ion still has a lot of plastic panels.

Clev -

The Ion was the last of the bunch. The S-Series was the only 100% Saturn design. The L-Series was an Opel drivetrain, and the Ion was the proto-Cobalt, but at least both had plastic. The first Vue had plastic too.

Saturn is basically the American name badge for Opel products these days, :( .

CarloSW2

How about making the plastic panels out of a Plant based plastic instead of petrochemicals?

We're probably on the 'same page' on this, but...

The Honda CiViC died, and was buried, in 2000!

From 2001-Present, the CiViC exists in name only. They're actually "Global Compact Platform" cars, so called. They share the same chassis with any number of other Honda compact cars/trucks and rely on the assumption that the American consumer is a chump!

Put another way - if you wanna drive a real Honda CiViC, you're gonna have to buy at least an 8-20 year-old one.

The fact that they're still available in large quantities speaks to the silliness of the notion that small cars are disposable, et cetera, et cetera! ;)

BlackDeuceCoupe you are right ON!

Although I have driven 2002+ civics and they do seem to handle quite nice, although in my opinion a 1992-1995 hatch with a B, H, or even K series engine is a benchmark for front wheel drive handling.

I had a 1993 Honda Civic sedan for 2 years I bought it with 460000km on the odometer and I retired it to the junkyard only because of rust and my not wanting to fix the rust as it was quite extensive. I drove this car HARRD, snowtires on down country roads with snow I would have gotten stuck in had I stopped, it is amazing what snow tires and keeping wheel spin (4000 rpm) will do for you. I must add that I did keep the car tuned very well, ngk iridiums, cap, rotor, fuel filter, 02 , clean pcv, good air filter.

Although I am partial to Toyota for high performance, do not get me wrong I like fwd hondas, but imo a MR2 or Celica All Trac Turbo with the 3sgte engine is what I would want to own over a Integra Type R, but with these toyotas you loose alot of the easy to work on traits of the DC/EG honda chassis

Here's an interesting stat...

JD Power Cuts 2008 US Auto-Sales View, Sees Drop In 2009

71 months is 6 (5.916) years!

Doing a little extrapolation, I *think* I can see why the auto industry is worried about 'us' buying "small cars" - and it doesn't have anything to do with the "enviroment", so called, unless they're talking about the "business enviroment"! ;)