Yes, but who’s going to design the things? Tesla’s gotten a waver on several safety issues because they’re a small company. Were they to go to mass-production, they’d lose those exemptions and would have to put the cars through things like crash tests (which can require several hundred cars). The Tesla also uses a number of expensive materials in its construction, like carbonfibre. Mass production will not significantly drive down those costs, on the contrary, they’ll increase them, as carbonfibre companies are having trouble keeping up with the demand they have now asking for them to produce enough carbonfibre to build some 70K+ cars is going to force the price up to the point where it is impractical to produce such vehicles at a profit. Then there’s the issues of the battery packs. The type of batteries used in the Tesla are more expensive than those used in other electric/hybrid vehicles, if they switch to the cheaper batteries, they loose the advantages given to them by the current set. Right there are two very high fixed costs that Tesla can do nothing about in the near term.
Yes, but you’re also over looking the fact that Ford heavily promoted their trucks, at the expense of their other vehicles. Additionally, since they were such high profit vehicles, Ford could afford to cut the price and offer all kinds of incentives to get people to buy them.
Nor has every car the US makers imported into the States been a disaster. Ford’s Fiesta sold quite well for a number of years and was built in Mexico. The problem is not that people are saying one thing and doing another, the problem is that the US car makers don’t have the flexibility that the Japanese do. Notice that the Japanese didn’t go whole hog into the big truck market like Detroit did. Yes, all of them offered those vehicles after a while, but they never turned their focus over to them to the degree that Detroit did. They also didn’t take those huge profits they made off the vehicles and put them into executive compensation, but put it into R&D. GM owns a number of car companies which produce small cars for foreign markets, yet GM cannot seem to make up its mind if they should bring them here to the States or not. It should be obvious that they need to do this, but the idiots can’t grasp this.
True, but I think that its the F-150 that outsold everything on the planet, however, I’m too lazy to dig the cite on that up, so I was just going with what Throaty posted.
My Saturn SC from 2001 got around 30mpg up to 37 on a good day with all HWY. My Ex’s 1995 SL got about the same. Again, these figures from the past are unrealisticly high, I never saw 40 MPG, not ever, and certainly not “easy”.
EPA figures are about the same.
That being said, I loved my SC2 and hated the ION.
I test drove the Astra. Seats were uncomfortable (in the lower end version, the only version they had to test drive), and they weren’t interested in selling me one, I couldn’t get anyone to talk to me. No turbo, no hybrid. Acceleration was barely adequate. I bought a Volvo C30 instead. Note that it is a small Euro car, just the kind you say Americans won’t buy.
However, since I had been a loyal Saturn customer for the last two cars, I really *really tried to get them to sell me one. They couldn’t be bothered to talk with me about the Astra, and then when the Aura Greenline came out I wanted one- Saturn had (almost) monthly deals on every car but the two Greenlines. I gave up.
Usually Low interest finacing, sometiems cahs, sometimes both.
Ah, you had the SC2 with the larger 120hp engine. The SL, SL1, and SC1 had a smaller 100hp engine, that definitely could get 40mpg, especially with a manual transmission. Sorry I didn’t make it clearer in my earlier post…I just used S-Series instead of listing out the difference in models.
I was really excited about the ASTRA, and it is a great little car, but it has been a total sales flop mostly because GM has failed to advertise it or offer ANY incentives on it. Sales have been meager at best. Now the hybrids are a different story. They didn’t make very many of them and the demand was so high that no incentives were offered, and quite frankly I don’t expect any to be offered on them until there is a surplus of inventory on them. Which won’t be any time soon. Sorry.
I had the Manual, and the EPA rates the two engines only 2 MPG apart. The engines were the same size, just that one was DOHC (the SC2) and the other SOHC.
eta- Saturn did have a few incentives for the Astra, but I admit they were few. Once they had Low interest financing for everything BUT the Hybrids.
When you said “They didn’t make very many of them and the demand was so high that no incentives were offered,…” you’re right- but *they made the choice *to make so damn few!
I believe out of all of those, only the Focus has done reasonably well. The new North American market Focus is doing very well, but is obviously different from the ROW model.
One would suppose that if those other cars had done well, the nameplates would not have been discontinued.
Up until very recently, no car maker in the WORLD makes the kind of big trucks (F150, Silverado, Ram) that Detroit makes. The biggest non-commercial truck type vehicles sold in the rest of the world were the Toyota 4Runner/Hilux and the Nissan Patrol, usually with small turbodiesel engines(compared to the 6+l Duramax or Cummings behemoths that Detroit trucks get), both of which would be considered compact trucks in the US. The Toyota Tundra and Nissan Titan are both made in the US and sold only in the US, as an effort to cash in on the lucrative truck market. Toyota just last year built a huge new facility in Texas to build only Tundras. That plant is now idle, although no layoffs have occurred yet, as Toyota knows that the UAW will pounce on them if anyone gets laid off.
How’s that for your mighty Japanese flexibility?
A quick look at sales figures tells me that the Volvo XC90, a huge gas guzzling SUV, outsells the C30 by almost 3 to 1, and this is VOLVO, so we’re talking about sales of a couple of hundred cars a month. I’m sure Honda sells more FITS in a month than Volvo sells cars in a year.
GM also loses money on every Astra they sell, so that would probably explain the lack of incentives.
I tell you all two little stories about why I amd skeptical about “my car gets…” stories.
My Dad owned a Pontiac, loved that car. Kept detailed milage rating every single fill-up. He always said “It gets around 29-30 on the highway”. After his death I found his little book. Several times the car got 29.xx MPG, but most of the fillups ran 24-26 MPG.
I went riding with freind who had a new Prius. She was telling me “it gets 60MPG”. Now,she is rather math challenged and the idea of her figuring out her MPG at fillup time like my Dad did was a little unlikely. So I asked her how she knew, and she pointed out her little MPG gauge, which is a cool tool. She said it had once hit 58 MPG. Ok, that’s close to 60. But right then and there it was showing 37. Now, I know a Prius can hit 60mpg; Mr Roadshow went on a little quest, learned several tricks, and yes, he could- sometimes, under ideal conditions- hit 60MPG. But real life was closer to the high 40’s.
The point is- the Pontiac did not really normally get “29-30” and a Prius does not really normally get 60.
Still pretty good. Toyota’s not tottering on the edge of bankruptcy like Detroit is, nor does Toyota really have to worry about the UAW getting their mitts on the plant (which, IIRC is being converted to produce other vehicles). Nissan has been doing layoffs here in TN and at their other plants, but they haven’t flipped to union control at any of their plants, even though the UAW’s trying desperately. I seriously doubt that Ford, GM, or Chrysler could afford to still pay their workers at an idle plant.
Note also that Toyota (and Nissan and Honda) didn’t get the “bright idea” that they could simply ship their gas guzzlers all over the place, but simply went for the one market where they could get the most sales from those vehicles. GM, at least, was trying to sell many of its Cadillac barges in Europe.
This is basically my point. Detroit is in trouble, but not because their management was somehow less insightful or skilled than their competitors. As noted, the overseas division of Ford and GM are doing quite well. The US operations of ALL the car makers were hit badly by the recent downturn. Detroit is simply being crushed by the additional burden of militant unions, skyrocketing healthcare costs (which their competitors in countries with UHC are shielded from) and the simple geographic fortune of being situated in the US, the most energy dependent economy in the developed world that also happened to be at the centre of the housing and credit bubbles. It’s not as if Toyota somehow made a management decision to not build giant trucks for the US market, they simply lacked the ability and were furiously catching up to Detroit in that market up until very recently. That they were in a better position to weather the current problems was pure luck.
No. As already pointed out repeatedly, both GM and Ford have successful European arms, Chrysler does OK with some niche vehicles like jeep, and the Ford Mondeo was even the most popular foreign car in Japan at one point (from memory, no cite). if they did try to sell caddies in Europe, it would have amount to very little in the big picture.
I read it, and disagree with it. In my experience, American drivers aren’t so completely braindead that they’d rear-end a car that just merged in front of them and is taking 15 seconds to get up to 60.
It’s very hard to find a good used one. Same with many other fuel-efficient cars that aren’t available in the US anymore.
Bull. Luck has nothing to do with it. The Japanese don’t pay their execs hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation, nor do their US operations have the advantage of UHC. Also they gradually eased themselves into the big truck market, and they did so based on dealer/customer feedback. Detroit has the annoying habit of not listening to their dealers and simply doing whatever the hell they want. I highly recommend reading the book Car Wars by Jonathan Mantle which covers the post-war automotive industry. The differences in business philosophy between American and Japanese car makers is incredibly vast.
There is no “if” GM does sell Caddies in Europe. Yes, they are a niche market, but so is Saab in the US. Nor are the profits of the European arms enough to keep Ford and GM afloat (Chrysler’s overseas operations are only partly owned by Chrysler, and in some cases the Chrysler vehicles sold in Europe are “Chrysler” in name only, with everything being built by one of the European car companies and the Chrysler nameplate being stuck on them. Chrysler doesn’t even design the vehicles, or have any real connection to them, only getting a fee for the use of the name.), if they were, GM and Ford wouldn’t be on their deathbeds. GM, IIRC, has been living off the profits from its European arm for quite awhile now, and instead of using that money to, well, get their shit together, they’ve been handing out massive compensation bonuses to their executives.
The F-150 was the best selling “car” in the US and Canada, but the oft-quoted statistic is that the F-Series was the best selling vehicle in the world, which is true assuming you count the 250/350/450 variants. It’s remarkably impressive no matter how you slice it, especially considering that they aren’t sold outside North America.
Well, if it makes you feel any better, it’s not a Saturn; it’s a Vauxhall/Opel with a Saturn badge on it.
Ford discontinues successful badges all the time- they did it with the Escort, the predecessor to the Focus, which was the best selling car in Europe at the time. The Contour/Mystique was discontinued because Ford shifted its own goalposts a bit- they made the next-gen Taurus a bit smaller, and the Focus a bit bigger, so keeping a US Mondeo was a bit pointless.
Note that GM and Ford have more or less autonomous European arms, though; they’re Europeans designing and building cars for the European market. You’re correct about Cadillac; they did try and sell the old barges in Europe, but they never imported many. I’d guess there are fewer than 1500 RHD Cadillacs in all of Britain. They have brought over a bunch of new models recently - the CTS, for example - and they don’t expect to sell more than a few hundred of each. It hardly seems worth the cost of RHD tooling.
Chrysler’s European operation builds the same models they sell here- the 300C, Caravan, all the Jeep models, and a few others. You may be thinking of GM’s European Chevrolet operation, which sells Daewoos rebadged as Chevys (plus the Corvette).
Nope. Back when Iacocca took over Chrysler, he had to sell off the European division to help keep the company afloat (I think it was Iacocca, it might have happened just before he took over, however.) and IIRC its in France where you’ll see cars badged Chrysler that have nothing in common with US versions other than they’re called Chrysler. Nor for much of the European operation is there really any corporate connection with the US operation. The bulk of European operations are ran by a company which Chrysler US has only a minority stake in, if that.
Note that the link doesn’t give the current status of Chrysler Europe, but I don’t think that its really all that different, as IIRC, Mercedes wasn’t interested in buying up the European operations when they bought Chrysler, though they did build a few vehicles in their plants.
I didn’t realize you were talking about Talbot and Matra and Sunbeam and all that stuff. They’ve been defunct for ages. They sell regular US-market Chryslers in Europe now.
Yes, but it is not the Chrysler corporation doing that, its Peugeot. And, IIRC, there are Peugeot built vehicles running around Europe with a Chrysler badge that the US corporation has nothing to do with. My point being that Chrysler Europe is not in any way comparable to GM or Ford’s European operations. Those are divisions (with a good deal of autonomy, of course), and their cash streams have been what’s kept Ford and GM afloat, while Chrysler doesn’t make any significant earnings from their European sales and Chrysler US could fold completely and the European operations would be unaffected by this. Note that the DeSoto nameplate, despite having been gone from the US for almost 50 years now, is being sold in Turkey.
What Peugeot is sold as a Chrysler? Chrysler sells mostly the same models in the rest of the world, under the Jeep and Chrysler marques (Dodge becomes Chrysler, so the Viper is a Chrysler Viper). Maybe some of the diesel versions use Peugeot technology since PSA Citroen Peugeot is a technology leader in small diesel engines, but lots of companies i.e. BMW also do that. Chrysler had a joint venture plant in Beijing producing Jeep variants for the Chinese until Daimler grabbed it in the merger and converted it to assembling C/E-class Mercedes for the Chinese market.