"Gas Guzzlers" & "trucks" are simply deflective red herrings
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Not at all. If Detroit had dedicated more effort to decent sedans and tried to build them better, they would not be in the mess they are in now, with a huge inventory of guzzler trucks and SUVs.
Once I had an 82 Buick Regal. Even though it had under 50K miles on it when I bought it, it cost a fortune to keep the damn thing running. It had a 3.8 liter V6 engine, and no power. I had to replace the gas pump, the motor mounts, the mugffler, the starter and the alternator and the head gaskets and do a ton of work on the AC and the Cruise control the first year I owned it. I was never sure the silly thing would stop in time. It turns out that it had front brake rotors exactly the same size as a Chevette. Eventually, it caught fire.
I wasn't ready to spend a lot of money, so I bought an 86 Hyundai Excel from a colleague. I fixed the muffler and replaced the alternator(it needed a bigger cable) and drive it on and off for six years. It wasn;t a great car, but it was very easy to work on. In those days Hyundais were the cheapest new car you could buy, and n one respected them. But Hyundai decided, unlike Detroit, to improve their image.
What did they do? They put in a 100K warranty on every car they built, and every year they improved the quality, while still keeping the prices down. And now, all the ar magazines and most people respect Hyundai.
GM won't give you that sort of warranty on anything they sell. The decision to implement this warranty was a management decision, of course.
In 1960-63 I worked at the Claycomo Ford Assembly plant. At that time, they made Comets and Falcons and some big Fords. Now they make trucks there.
If a Comet of a Falcon was defective, it was almost always because the mnagement was speeding up the line and not providing enough relief workers to send on the line when others needed to take a bathroom break. No one does his best job when he can only think about taking a pee, face it.
They manufactured the Falcon from 1960 to 1967 in the US, but that same body style that we built at Claycomo was manufactured up through 2000 or so in Argentina and Brazil, but they improved the brakes, wheels, engines and suspension greatly. These cars had a shitty reputation in the US, but Argentines think they were great cars, except that they had an unhappy reputation of being the cars that the Fascist Secret Service used to haul their enemies off to their doom during the Dirty Little War period of Videla and thge other Fascist generals in the 1980's.
