I have a HP Envy laptop and it looks and performs very good (if you can discount a busted fingerprint sensor within a year of purchase). My work laptop is a Dell and performs reasonably well, too, though it isn’t exactly smoking hot. I recently bought a Nissan Altima sedan and am totally in love with it. The Japanese make the best cars, period.
From the 70’s to 1995 I was loyal to Detroit. My cars were GM, Ford, or Chrysler.
OMG, did I get burned. Despite proper maintenance and care, they continually failed in small and not so small ways, and I was lucky to get 100K miles out a couple of them.
Starting in 1995 we went with Toyota/Lexus, Hyundai, Subaru. Smooth sailing all, all well over 250K (350-400k for the Lexi unless I hit too many deer with one), minimal downtime for problems. Never again, Detroit.
I had a Toyota for 17 years before finally trading it in. It was pretty reliable but I just needed something new.
I replaced it with a Chevy, and I’ve had that car for 3 years now without a single problem.
I buy compact cars, little economy things. Easy to drive and park, good mileage. Maybe that’s the difference?
Toyota Land Cruiser
Awhile back we had a Ford Escape hybrid. It was a good vehicle except for an unfortunate tendency it developed when braking near stoplights - suddenly jerking forward for what seemed like about six inches when almost stopped. At best, very disconcerting. At worst, a potential accident-causer.
When we took it in for servicing, the dealer’s service department showed us a Ford publication indicating this was part of normal operation. We insisted on replacement of the component involved and the problem ceased. Later we found out that a number of drivers had reported a similar situation.
The likelihood of my buying another American car is somewhere near zero. Other American products, sure (noting that they’re liable to have considerable foreign components or foreign assembly anyway).
I’m not following this:
Honda and some Acuras are made in USA: 12 PLANTS
Honda’s manufacturing plants in America produce 5.9 million products annually. Facilities produce: Honda and Acura vehicles and their engines, transmissions, and components; aircraft and aircraft engines; power equipment; and powersports products.
MADE IN AMERICA
Six of the top ten vehicles in the 2019 American-Made Index are produced by Honda.
Source: Cars.com 2019 American-Made Index
Toyota is made in America: Toyota Production in North America Nearly 2 Million in 2018
Tundra trucks made in Texas.
More than 38 Million Vehicles Produced in North America Since 1986
Kia -Georgia
Hyundai - Alabama
Mercedes Benz - Alabama
BMW - largest worldwide plant is in South Carolina.
VW - The Volkswagen Group of America also directs all activities at the Volkswagen manufacturing facility in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
…
These are the vehicles still being made on that site:
- Volkswagen Golf.
- Volkswagen Golf Sportsvan.
- Volkswagen Golf R.
- Volkswagen Golf GTI.
- Volkswagen Golf GTE.
- Volkswagen e-Golf.
- Volkswagen Tiguan.
Nissan - made in America- The assembly of Nissan vehicles has a large impact in the U.S. in terms of the number of vehicles assembled and the number of people employed. In 2018, Nissan is celebrating “50 combined years of manufacturing in the U.S.” as its Tennessee plant marks its 35th anniversary and its Mississippi facility celebrates its 15th.
In the U.S., Nissan facilities assemble more than 1 million vehicles a year and employ more than 22,000 people, including 17,000 manufacturing jobs. More than 9,000 new jobs have been created by Nissan since mid-2011 in the U.S. In the 35 years of manufacturing operations in the U.S., the company has never had a single layoff among its full-time U.S. workforce.
In what practical sense is Toyota not American?
My wife owns a 2007 Chevy HHR. It was previously owned by a mechanic and we bought it with about 80k miles on it in 2017.
While it’s not had any major problems, there’s lots of little things that bug me: the passenger side heated seats don’t work, the check engine light comes on and the goes off at random times, and now the transmission probably needs serviced – it’s shifting hard. There’s also a mildew smell that arises in the summer when the AC is turned on – or worse, the recirculation switch is turned on. Yuck. Its also fugly as sin, but whatever. Anyway, my wife’s dad is a Chevy guy and I can’t really talk her into buying anything else. Her previous car was a Chrysler Town and Country that went well over 200K miles, but we did have to rebuild the engine at one point.
I have a ~75 mile daily commute and so when I needed a new car in the fall of 2019 I settled on a little gunmetal gray Honda Civic. It was that or a Toyota Corolla. I was also looking at a Kia Soul, as all three cars were offered with a manual transmission (mandatory for me). The Soul however only had manuals available on the base model, and that wasn’t going to work. I ended up choosing the Civic due to its legendary reliability and longevity. My wife immediately named it Sasha (so far, thankfully, nobody has figured out why). I’ve only put about 13K miles on it so far, but from March 18 2020 to Jan 11 2021 I was working from home and driving minimally. Now I’m back to putting ~400 miles a week on it. I predict that it will last me many years, which is exactly what I needed. Despite my rotund frame the seats are comfy and in general it’s a pleasure to drive. I have some gripes but those are with the design, not the engineering. At 13K miles the only thing I’ve had to do is replace wiper blades and two tires due to a pothole. I also need to replace the windshield as a stray rock put a short crack in it a couple weeks ago. That one is going to smart.
If Kia ever releases the Soul with both a manual transmission and cruise control on the same model I’ll probably think seriously about trading the Honda in. But I doubt that will happen any time soon, and I’m happy to drive my little Sasha for years to come.
It is a Japanese-owned company with the prototypical emphasis upon quality and reliability.
I think the point is that it clearly isn’t that American workers cannot produce a good product, nor that Japanese cars are as a class infallible–Toyota has had a couple of major screwups that required large scale recalls in the last decade or so–but as a corporate philosophy the choice is made to emphasize a need for quality and perform the necessary development testing and quality controls to assure that the majority of the cars they produce are highly reliable. This wasn’t always the case; the post-WWII Japanese auto industry was essentially kickstarted with licensed and unlicensed British automotive designs and all of the defects and quality problems that entailed. (To be fair, cars of the era were not in general reliable by modern standards, but the British car industry has earned its mantle again and again with shoddy vehicles that make mechanics cringe.)
The Japanese actually saw what companies like Ford and GM were doing in terms of a systematic approach to improving quality by systematic and continuous process improvement, and essentially embraced it wholeheartedly in a way that US auto companies never really did. When it came to the point that the oil crises of the 'Seventies caused American car buyers to look at Japanese imports as an economical alternative to gas-guzzling Detroit land yachts they also found that Japanese companies as a whole had figured out how to make innovative, reliable, and competitively priced vehicles that lacked frills and were often quirky (I never tired of showing people where the spare tire was stored on a pre-90s Subaru GL), and while Detroit was busy trying to convince people to get excited about cars like this, companies like Toyota, Honda, and Nissan were improving performance, safety, features, and comfort without compromising quality, and basically ate the American auto industry’s lunch.
Initial build quality on American cars has improved, and if you are looking for a reliable heavy duty truck Ford is still really your best option, but in general, vehicles built by Japanese companies–even those built by American workers and often on production facilities purchased from American car companies–are significantly more reliable and well-built, and that goes back to the core of how they are conceived, designed, parts sourced, quality controls imposed, and the general attitude of corporate management on what they consider to be most important in their products.
Stranger
Non-union plants have a lot to do with it.
Dozens of so-called foreign "transplants” — from Asian mainstream manufacturers to European luxury makers — have followed Honda’s model across the United States in recent decades. The influx has transformed America’s auto landscape with a cheaper, more flexible, non-union workforce model upping competitive pressure on unionized Detroit.
Today, the Detroit Three automakers are an island of UAW production surrounded by foreign transplants that now make up 48% of U.S. vehicle production, according to the Ann Arbor-based Center for Automotive Research. That’s up from just 17% in 2000. Non-union employment rose from 15% of the industry at the century’s turn to 39% in 2013, according to the most recent Automotive News analysis.
I understand your point, but where I’m from it’s a sin to buy a car that isn’t from an American company - namely, GM or Ford. My best friend’s Dad wouldn’t let me park in his driveway because I drove a Honda. When I volunteered at El Centro Obrero (The Worker’s Center) in Southwest Detroit many, many years ago, we were not allowed to park in the parking lot because we were driving a “foreign” car. Some people are really passionate about this. And irrational.
This is my take. I buy the highest quality and to hell with where it came from. Want me to “buy 'Merikun”? Then boost the quality or else fuck off.
I think some Apple products are made in Ireland, IIRC. I’ve had 3 iPhones and 3 iPads, all gave (giving) my money’s worth.
Hondas kinda run in my family…
They run in everyone’s family, that’s why people like them! Boom tish.
I have a Ford Ranger. It is getting a reputation here as being as tough and reliable as a Toyota Hilux, and that’s saying something.
It was in substantial part designed in Australia, and built in Malaysia. The electrics seem to be substantially German. And so on…
Nope, the Apple “presence” in Ireland is only for tax purposes.
Occasionally even murderous. Anti-foreign car industry animosity spurred the Vincent Chin murder. Detroit isn’t the only place people feel strongly about Buy American, but it can get extremely vicious.
That is supposed to be a rant? Come on, try harder!
Read somewhere on the net:
On vehicles with a manual transmission, cruise control is less flexible because the act of depressing the clutch pedal and shifting gears usually disengages the cruise control . Therefore, cruise control is of most benefit at motorway/highway speeds when top gear is used virtually all the time.
Lancia is an Italian company, is it not? My father had one in the 70s, was a nice car for the times, but his next car was a BMW and that was way better, and more reliable. Do they still exist, or where they swallowed by FIAT too?
Do I remember correctly that the spare was under the hood, basically against the firewall, above and behind the tiny engine that had been shoved sideways up to the grill?
A friend of mine - back during one of those huge Buy American! pushes in the 1980s - bought a top. It very proudly had “Made in America” on the front it. The buttons and button holes were misaligned really badly. She wore it when doing household stuff like painting the front door.
Ireland has or had a number of “screwdriver” assembly plants for electronics. Very simple final assembly operations to get around import restrictions.