"Go Buy a Car!"

[staticengine]

A post on the Daily Kos this morning had me thinking about the automotive industry a bit, and how reliability drives down demand if people are satisfied with what they have. The first car I drove was an '87 Jeep Cherokee, and it was fine for college, but I treated it like crap, and thus, by the time I realized it needed regular maintainance, it

Comments

[yougimmepanda]

I find it annoying that in this economy, Mercedes Benz and other high-end car companies are trying to get people to buy products that LEASE for over $400/mo. What the hell are the payments like then? I think it's reprehensible that companies focus on the holidays for purchases of that magnitude

[staticengine]

these companies appeal to people's insecurities about themselves, and I think that's wrong. Then again, I guess MOST advertising tries to accomplish that.
I think that way about every womens magazine. But then, music magazines aren't much better, since they're all about telling us we need "piece of gear-X" to be the hot new thing. I haven't bought a single piece of new music gear since canceling my subscription to Sound-On-Sound and Keyboard.

They built bigger, not smarter, and now there are a shit-ton of gas- guzzling, overpriced, pieces of crap sitting on random lots that will most likely remain unpurchased.I think the auto companies really missed the boat on redefining their own industry. They went for the quick buck and the quarterly boost when the SUV craze was going on when they could have been investing in alternate fuel and seeding the idea that hybrid was the way to go in the future

[yougimmepanda]

Yeah, they really could have taken more control over themselves, instead of trying to push soon-to-be-obsolete technology on the world.
It's stupid to me that companies don't seem to care about alternative technology - think of all the jobs that could be created! But they don't seem interested, and I'm guessing it has something to do with oil lobbies - I could be wrong, but....

[marc17]

I don't think it was really a quick buck. They've been able to outsell foreign competitor's trucks since the 70's due to tariffs on such (which they got SUVs to count as). Since they had the price advantage, they made that their main concentration. Now that trucks really aren't desired, they're in trouble.

[marc17]

My first three cars, a '72 Dodge Charger, Ford Fairmont Station wagon, and Dodge diplomat were given to me by my parents. I ran them into the ground and only had to pay for repairs on the last one which eventually died of a bad electrical system (it got so I could change the alternator in less than two minutes). My first car was a Hundai. When looking for car advice, My dad told me "all those jap cars are good" and I got a nice little used hatchback. It was a major lemon and my monthly repair bills were about as much as my payments on it. It caused me no end of trouble and finally died due to so many problems it wasn't worth trying to fix. Next time I went to look for a car, I checked Consumer Reports first. Guess what, every car I was interested in (small with good gas milage) on the used car lots was on their Lemon List. So I bought a brand new '94 Toyota Turcell that I still have. It's never been in the shop for a repair except when I took it in for the 100,000 mile replace everything that might wear out (timing belt, water pump,

[marc17]

I also had a '78 Toyota pickup with custom tool bed that I used for camping and hauling stuff that I got rid of because I didn't use it enough to justify the cost. I bought it off eBay Motors and drove it back from BFE Oregon for 6 hours to Seattle with one cylinder not firing. Me and a friend did several thousand dollars worth of work because it was simple enough that such work could be done with a normal set of tools. I might still have it for Burning Man if it could go higher than 70 mph on the highway. It was in the shop once with a problem that made it undrivable, a worn out clutch. Considering it was a '78 work truck and the milage didn't go into 100,000's of miles, and I doubt it actually only had 20k on it, no telling how many miles it really was running on with all original parts as far as I could tell.

[antje23]

I'm on my 6th car. Bearing in mind that all of them except my current car were overly used. I bought my current car because I wanted something reliable, that wouldn't become toast on a forest service road, and that got excellent gas mileage. (All of which the Mitsubishi Outlander provides)

I'd be curious to see the statistics around leased vehicles vs. purchased vehicles over the last 10 years, then through this recession.

[h2so4]

Me, I've owned 18 cars in 30 years of driving. I enjoy buying
a new car every few years. I'm pretty sure that I'm not "severely
image conscious" I just like cars.

[taufactor]

'81 Ford Mustang II, 6 months, engine seized when the oil pan developed a sudden hemmorrhage