I don’t think that is true at this precise moment, but that is more a statement about general things like the overall car market and the current low price of gas, rather than the Toyota Prius.
We took advantage of this by buying a new Prius for cash last month, paying thousands below MSRP. Every dealer we went to had dozens sitting there in storage, waiting to be sold. A far cry from the waiting lists of earlier years. One dealer even fed us a line about not wanting to sell them right now, as they could get more money for them later when gas goes back up. Sounded plausible to my not-a-car-dealer ears, although I still think it was just something to say to shift bargaining power.
I can’t find a cite (though I haven’t been looking), but I remember hearing on the news that hybrid sales are way down, particularly because gas is cheap. I’m sure there is a optimal price point for gas that translates into increased purchases of Priuses.
First off, even assuming what you say is correct (see below), this assumes that Congress has the knowledge of interest to make their dictates wisely. I consider that less likely than finding that Lincoln was “only kidding” about that whole shot-to-death thing.
Second, the problem is that while it’s true that consumers want more of those nice good things, they usually want other things more. Go ahead and make a good list (say, 25 items) of things people might want in a car. Quality upholstry, low price, fitted seats, flawless steering, perfect brakes, rarely requires service, hybrid engine, fuel economy, etc. The problem is that they will claim they want all of that. It’s not until you ask them to make tradeoffs and choose themselves, with their money on the table, that the inevitable hemming and hawing starts cropping up.
Suddenly, things start to look real different to the customer, and suddenly all that carefully collected marketing data starts to look pretty useless. It was asking the wrong question.
Now, you may claim that people want these things, and I’m sure they do. When I dream, I want a pony. A magical pony that can fly me to school and back. But I don’t get a pony. I get a car. I want a brand-new hybrid car with 100 miles per gallon and all the trimmings. I get a 2000 Honda Civic.
Reputation lingers for along time and is hard to overcome.
FORD for example…known as ‘fix or repair daily’…
In order for me to buy another Ford, Ford would have to compensate me for the one Ford I owned in my life. They would have to give me (or extremely discount, say 50%) a Ford automobile which I would have to drive for years and have little trouble.
THEN I would consider buying Ford again…but would still probably need a hand written apology from the Ford CEO.
Since this is not going to happen, I will never buy a Ford again. This attitude gets spread to friends and family. Ford could all of a sudden put out the best cars ever and I woul dhave extreme trouble stepping onto a Ford dealership let alone buy one.
This is a huge part of the problem, and no amount of money can fix it in the short term. Toyota and Honda have spent the better part of 3 decades building reputations of quality, longevity, and reliability to the point where their vehicles command much higher used prices than domestics with comparable years & miles. Whether or not recent domestic automobiles are in fact any worse than the Japanese is beside the point. Most consumers believe the domestic models are inferior because for nearly 30 years they have been inferior. That can’t be undone by making a few good cars for a couple years. It can only be undone by producing good cars for a couple decades - decades which GM may very well not have.
Ford’s reliability is about standard for the industry, but when you have to fix something on one of them, you quickly discover that a diseased monkey could have come up with a better design. Some examples that I’ve had to deal with include using the black wire as the “hot” wire in the harness, while industry standard has been to use a red for “hot” and black for the ground. Guess what happens to something if you hook those wires up wrong? Or there was the brake caliper which was designed so that in order to change the pads, you had to use a hacksaw to cut off one of the bolts. Then there was the routing of the power steering lines on a Lincoln that I owned, the mechanic I took it to threatened me with bodily harm if I ever asked him to fix it again, it was so bad.
To be fair, all car sales are way down. Hybrids, because of their higher price, have taken a slightly larger hit since gas prices have fallen, but they’re pretty much the future at this point.
It all boils down to this: the USA auto industry (imports/transplants) included, have a production capacity of >18 million cars/year. The market has shrunk to less than half of that. You simply cannot keep idle capacity open. So, some plants HAVE to close.
I think the auto manufacturers plans should be equal to the plans the banks submitted before they took tax money. Why are we asking them to submit plans ? They are taking a lot less money than the bankers who caused this mess. I suppose we just understand that the MBAs that caused the mess are beyond our comprehension, but anybody can run a car company.
Maybe because we saw how the banks screwed up with the bailout we gave them (10% went to executive bonuses, another 50-60% went to buy other banks, less than a third actually went to unfreeze the credit market), and we don’t want that to happen again with this money.
