Quote:
Originally Posted by BEEF
....but they are still imports???
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Where's the money going? With American-built import marques, ultimately, the money's going overseas, therefore, it's import. I would wager that GM's Aveo is sending a fair amount of money over to the Koreans as well. Plus, I can't help but think that even though a lot of import makes assemble here, they're still using imported subassemblies made of imported materials from imported suppliers
not to mention the incentives that localities often give to attract the factories in the first place...
As to why imports are more highly regarded...a lot of this reputation was built in the 80's when much of it was true. Anymore, I find all cars to be on a very low plane of quality (plastic? bleagh...), but more or less equal. Still, the imports work very hard to retain this notion of superior quality.
FWIW, we have had only one Japanese car in my lifetime, an '04 Toyota Sienna. It was the second most problematic vehicle we had behind my Mom's New Beetle. We traded that Sienna at 20k miles and never looked back. OTOH, the most reliable car we ever owned was a VW Passat - 5 years, near 60k miles, and not one single solitary problem. Weighed 3800lbs with the AWD and made a lifetime average in excess of 22mpg.
Then there are cars that are a chop job of American and import stuff? We had some '96 Dodge Caravans carrying Mitsu 3-litre V6's with a Mitsu trans...the only stuff that ever went wrong on them was stuff related to Mitsu's powertrain, although they were el-strippo models with nothing much else that could go wrong anyway.
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