<VV> ulterior motives, reasonable design goals

[Tony Underwood]

At 09:13 hours 09/03/2006, djtcz at comcast.net wrote:
>I find none of those design goals objectionable or devious.
>I think if we replaced "emissions" with good gas mileage they apply 
>exactly to the 1960 Corvair.
>When stylish and fun-to-drive enters the mix a manufacturer SHOULD 
>sell a ton of them.
>
>I am just saddened that excess in the form of 4WD and pounds is SO 
>popular recently, apparently only made un-attractive by higher fuel 
>prices.  We Americans are clearly a fickle bunch, and strongly prone 
>to crowd behaviour.


Not all of us.    ;)

No SUV for me.  Instead, I drive a car that less than .01% of the 
rest of America drives daily.     Hell, that figure could well be 
kinda high.


>I don't see how I can blame the manufacturers for that.
>GM/FORD/ Daimler Chrysler can't really force us into buying 
>anything.  Otherwise Toyota wouldn't sell a single CAMRY .


One would kinda hope that car makers here would look at what people 
want rather than a bottom line.  That's what got GM into trouble in 
the first place.   They were insisting on making what they thought 
people should buy.  DC got into a rut the same way, while continuing 
to lose out on sales of sporty coupes which Honda and Toyota and 
Nissan readily provided, while offering up a new Dodge "charger" 
based on their luxo-barge 300 LX platform, even including 4 doors... 
expecting it to sell like hotcakes and it didn't, while Ford had 
already seen the writing on the wall after realizing that they'd been 
doing the same thing as everyone else here by building dull cars with 
no identity...  thus the resurrection of the classic lines of the 
Mustang for their 2005 model year which sold so well Ford couldn't 
keep up with demand; in fact the new Mustang was about the only thing 
Ford was actually selling in good numbers.

Now DC is bring us a new Challenger next year...  and of course it's 
a 2-door coupe, in spite of that nitwit Trevor Creed's dictate that 
"...DC would dedicate itself to the FWD 4-door automobile"...  which 
we all know wasn't working.   Someone among the suits at DC woke up 
and read TC the riot act, evidently.   Not only is the Challenger 
back, but expect a redesign of the "charger" along the way to make it 
more of the car that should be living up to the name.    Chevrolet 
has its hands full making the Camaro comeback a reality, seeing as 
how everyone knows it's a "meeee too" response to the new Mustang and 
Dodge's Challenger efforts.    GM needed to do *something*...   That 
rebadged Holden GTO at 40 thousand bucks didn't pan out.    At least 
it did shift the mindset among the beancounters towards building cars 
that were RWD and V8 powered again...  retro ain't out of style just 
yet.    Even the Impala, which isn't RWD yet, does offer a V8 this 
year.    However, there remains a lot of catching up to do yet.


>Toyota has earned a pretty darned good rep for reliability.


The people running Toyota are ruthless.   They are also smart.   THAT 
makes them dangerous competitors for domestic auto makers who had 
damned well  better wake up before Toyota pulls the rug out from 
underneath them altogether.   Toyota has wanted to rule the auto 
industry for decades now, and they've been working tooth and nail 
towards that goal.

Pearl Harbor didn't work out as expected, so now they're "buying US 
out" via running the domestic auto industry outta town.    The 
sorry-assed part of this is that so few people actually realize what 
Toyota is doing.


>Whether US mfrs are really behind may be open to debate,

Not in MY camp.   US car makers are in the red (well, except for DC 
which *did* finally wake up) because they refused to look at the 
markets, instead listening to their own beancounters.   Rice 
continued to advance in sales...  GM and Ford scratched their heads 
and wondered why.   Meanwhile, DC was listening to their new CEO ("Dr 
Z") who had only recently stepped up from running Chrysler, left 
behind some pretty good policy exchanges which have been working out 
pretty well... Chrysler seems to be at least making  little money 
while Ford and GM continue to struggle to keep from losing *more* money.

GM should have listened to what Bob Lutz had to say to them years 
ago, instead of waiting for things to get better as-is.    Dumb-asses...


>but the ability to routinely go 150 kmiles with the barest of 
>maintenance is pretty well documented.


US car makers could do this; they have the tech and the know-how but 
they're too busy paying out the ass to unions to be able to afford to 
build a car that can compete head to head with the Rice 
Brigade...  which doesn't have the union issues to deal with.

US car makers dug their own hole...   now they're paying for their 
lack of vision.


>It was not always thus.  I can remember when those cute little 
>Corollas were the subject of a factory upgrade around 1972/3.  New 
>valves, rocker arms, etc, etcs at less than 20,000 miles.



They got over it.   Toyota went to work making a better product, 
improving and advancing...

...using the same techniques which originally had made GM 
great.    GM forgot...  Toyota didn't.    GM *let* Toyota do it to 
them by default.    Now, whose fault is it?   Likewise Ford, which 
got into trouble playing that same beancounter game.


"Why are you still driving that old Corvair?   Why don't you buy a 
real car?"

Trouble with that logic is that if I buy a "real car" I'm likely to 
end up paying more for it than I paid for my house.

What's wrong with that picture?


I bet that old Corvair will go another 100,000 miles yet again and it 
will likely cost me less than 1000 bucks on maintenance the whole 
way.   That includes the repaint I keep promising to do...



Normal people wouldn't do this sort of thing.  They'd be going into 
hock for a new SUV...    I have no car payments and in fact outside 
my mortgage I'm debt free.    Now, if someone made a new car that I 
thought was worth the money and was something I actually *LIked*, 
maybe I'd consider it.   But right now, there's not much out there 
that I'd buy...  not that there's nothing I like; it just costs too 
much to justify putting my daily driver 'Vair out to pasture.

I'll not go into debt to buy a new car just to keep up with the Jones 
bunch.    Scrue that noise.

Besides...  is there *anything* being built today that would likely 
last anywhere nearly as long as my current daily driver?    The 
cliche "they don't build 'em like they used to" ain't just idle chatter.


tony..