Q: What will happen to the company i love, and why? Will the upcoming volt be the revolution it needs to save itself, or a high stakes gamble that will sink them, and why? What happened to trash America's car reputation? Why is everyone so eager to buy a honda or toyota? Saying they last long, but a ford/chevy/dodge will run til the apocalypse if you change the oil every 5000 miles. I have a 1981 f-100 250,000 miles, still runs as strong as ever, had to replace the camshaft and that's it, everything else is OEM. Will the one surviving american product finally be defeated and outsourced to japan? LONG LIVE THE BIG THREE!
A: There are valid points in all of these posts. But the way I see it, people buy a certain kind of car because they are told to. Some "expert" car magazine like Car and Driver tells you that nothing in the world is better than a Honda, so of course you have to buy one to show how intellectual you are. Back in the '50s and '60s the Nazis dumped VWs on our shores and people snapped them up like crazy. Didn't matter that they had no torque and couldn't carry much. GM even took the VW concept and turned it into a good car (the Corvair), but Ralph Nader, who doesn't even drive, spoke out against both the Corvair and the Beetle. The 'Vair died while the Beetle lived on. American companies had a wide range of 6-cylinder cars and even a 4-cylinder in the Chevy II. But as soon as they introduced smaller cars, we demanded V8s in them. Nader and the Beetle weren't what actually killed the Corvair. It was lee Iacocca and the Mustang and John De Lorean and the GTO. US companies used advanced (for the time) technology like disc brakes independent rear suspension and an OHC 6-cylinder. Uh-uh. If we want that stuff we'll go to them furriners. I always heard that Japanese cycles were better than Harleys because they didn't break down and didn't leak oil. Funny nobody cared about the oil stripe on the underside of their Japanese car's hood. The Japanese made some horrible, evil mistakes on their cars sometimes, but usually that gets ignored. Another "funny" thing: Oldsmobile, which had one of the finest, longest lasting V8s, died. Too boring. Welcome to hell.