2nd May 2017, 19:58

The Olds, Buick and Chevy my parents bought were done so brand-new. All of those cars had serious mechanical/electrical issues. None made it even to the 50k mark before the things were garbage. Anyone that wants to claim that American cars of that period were great is only going to get a mild chuckle from me, because they were in fact often just crap. One only needs to look at the myriad of various publications of that era to see how badly those cars rated for long term and even short term reliability.

At this point American cars are right up there with any other manufacturer... but ironically many of them are from foreign platforms such as the Cruz, Taurus, Fusion, Fiesta, and Focus. Does the fact that those cars come from platforms developed overseas make them inferior? Of course not. They are global platforms and have had to be tested in numerous terrains. Many have been sold in Europe for decades where the higher demands for better interiors and handling means by the time they make it to our shores, they're already tried and proven products.

Many of the full sized trucks from US manufacturers are loaded up with imported parts too: Many Dodge and Ford trucks used Aisin transmissions for example. In fact just take a look at any vehicle. It's not like the whole thing is just one solid thing, but rather a collection of parts from 100s of different companies from around the world. It's no different than a computer sporting innumerable capacitors, resistors, processors, hard drives and so on from probably dozens of countries from around the world. The whole reason why we can still to this day go out and buy a car that's fully loaded with power everything for the still amazingly reasonable price of $20-$30k is enabled by that level of global competition. In fact a friend of mine bought a brand-new Volvo station wagon. Talk about an example of modern commerce: Volvo was owned by Ford, then was sold to Geely, a Chinese firm. The cars are still designed in Sweden. I took a look under the hood and there were seriously a few parts stamped "FoMoCo" (Ford) as well as parts from Vietnam, Germany, China and many other places. The car was seriously a very nice car, but again - a car made of truly internationally sourced parts.

At some point these discussions always fall back to the same thing, and that is about the differences between evaluating and deciding on vehicles on a comparative basis for the sake of their merits as machines, versus simply making blind declarations over nothing more than patriotism. I will not nor should I make a decision on a single item I purchase on where that item was made. That not only does me a disservice, but in turn the manufacturers as well.

Come to think of it, if we were only ever supposed to make choices based on whether something was American and that was our only choice, then that would more or less be communism, right? I mean look at all of the crappy cars made by all of those former Soviet bloc countries: outright garbage because that was the only choice to be had, and the makers of those cars had no reason to improve them either, since there existed no competition, right?