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Automotive News & Views Buying American Cars What Does It Mean?
7263 messages, Last post on May 27, 2009 at 4:31 AM
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With parts coming from everywhere, does "Buying American" have much meaning anymore? Is quality and price the bottom line?
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Replying to: andre1969 (Mar 09, 2006 7:57 am)  WOW some of those cars I've never heard of you just listed. Rocky
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Replying to: rockylee (Mar 09, 2006 8:17 am) Don't EVEN get andre started on the Mopars..... 
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Replying to: lemko (Mar 09, 2006 7:37 am) Yep, and a spiffy ride it is. Ford offers nothing even close to it here. http://www.ford.com.au/range/falcon/models/ |
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| That sounds curious. | |
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Replying to: rockylee (Mar 09, 2006 6:18 am) |
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Replying to: rockylee (Mar 09, 2006 6:18 am) Americans like and (ahem!) need larger cars. Larger=heavier. Heavier cars need horsepower and torque to pull them. You can get lots of HP from a turbo-charged 4 cylinder, but you would have to gear the car low and run the engine at high RPM to compensate for the lack of torque in a small displacement engine. When you run any engine at high RPM, gas consumption skyrockets. Bottom line is, there's no free lunch. You can also think of it like this: It takes a certain amount of gasoline to pull a certain amount of weight. Heavy cars are always going to need a lot of fuel to motivate them. If you are willing to accept really poor performance, you can get pretty good mileage from a small engine on a heavy car. However, most people can't tolerate their car having dog-slow acceleraiton. The best solution? Lose weight! Even a Hummer-sized vehicle could get 25mpg if it were light enough. But, lightness is way more expensive than fuel right now! |
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Replying to: rockylee (Mar 09, 2006 6:18 am) I think it is due to a combination of factors. 1. Maybe a lot of Americans think the current prices are just a temporary thing and that prices will drop back below to the $1.50-1.75 a gallon range. 2. General affluence - a lot of people can afford to pay the current prices. Or, they are paying the current prices instead of doing something else with the money like putting it in savings. The natioanl savings rate was negative last year, meaning people spent more money than they made. I think the last time the savings rate was negative was during the Depression. 3. I don't think the Big 2.5 want people buying smaller cars (where you are more likely to find 4 cylinder engines). "Small cars small profits, big cars big profits." GM pushed SUVs awfully hard during the Olympics. There was a reason for that.
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Replying to: andre1969 (Mar 09, 2006 7:57 am) We had the (mis)fortune of seeing the very worst that the US car industry could construct. And, for me at least, growing up in the southern mid-west and being of modest means, what was available to us was the dregs. No '69 Chevelles for us. We rode around town in old Grands Prix, Ford XL's and LTD's (the big'uns from the seventies), Granada's (Grenade - a), Fairmonts, and the occasional clapped out Thunderbird or Cougar. The occasional weird friend would have an early CVCC (the civic, before it was officially a civic). We were brought up to understand that American cars built before 1973 were "it". Everything else was slow, knocked and pinged, and would only get worse in the future. We had no way of knowing that horsepower would ever come back. I had two friends whose fathers were crazy or just really cool, and allowed them to have actual musclecars. An old 351 XR7 Cougar and a 66 Goat. Even though they were relatively stock, they would blow by the rest of us like we were sitting still. The days of good cars were long gone, so we thought.
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Replying to: rockylee (Mar 09, 2006 6:18 am) Not to be too pointy... actually the majority of the US is driving 4c autos, Rocky. As I know you are closely involved with the Big 2.5 I can understand why you might not see this trend but the following stats should be enlightening. Round numbers: #1 Camry 450,000 sales ( 400,000 in 4c ) #2 Accord 420,000 sales ( 375,000 in 4c ) #3 Corolla 375,000 sales ( 100% as 4c ) #4 Civic 360,000 sales .. ( 100% as 4c ) #5 Altima 300,000 sales ( 250,000 in 4c ) Of the top 5 selling autos in the US nearly all are 4c with HP ranging from 130 - 175. Then factor in , Sonata's, Focus', Sentra's, Elantra's and others and the numbers are way up in favor of 4c over 6c. This is what this tells me. A) Detroit has swung and missed on understanding what the US market wants since it keep trying to sell V6's to a 4c buying market. or.. B) They realize that making profitable 4c Compact/Midsize cars is not economically feasible with their current cost structure so they've given up on it.
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Replying to: kdhspyder (Mar 09, 2006 3:11 pm) The trucks and SUV's may be highly inefficient, but the passenger cars that many of us buy tend to be 4-cylinder cars, despite the horsepower wars and the hype. Here are a few theories why the Big 2.5 haven't cared much about this market in the US: -Margins aren't high enough for their tastes or to make these cars interesting. (They seem to sell what they do sell just to meet CAFE standards.) That these cars are good gateway cars to a younger audience, or that the transplants can sell such cars with perfectly reasonable margins, seem not to resonate with management. -Their legacy technologies mostly comprise older pushrods that they've opted to refine. Rather than invest in building an excellent four-cylinder motor, they have focused their efforts on either improving older technology (GM 3800 and 5.7 liter/350) or making a better V8 (Ford's very good 4.6 liter). Again, they go for the margins per unit, rather than devote much energy to building an excellent 4-cylinder that will find its way only into econoboxes and cheaper family cars. -The compact car segment is highly competitive, less so than the truck markets. They have devoted their energies to the truck segment, where they stand a better chance of making more money, and are not really trying to beat the transplants in the retail subcompact or compact segments in which the transplants dominate. Very much the strategy of a beancounter looking at margin, rather than a long-term manager with a view toward building market share. When times were good, a strategy to compete in the lower end of the car market would have simply reduced profits, which would have made no friends on Wall Street. But now that fuel prices and tastes are shifting, that shortsightedness is catching up with them.
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