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Originally Posted by dsmnick
It is much like what happened with GM in the 70s...so much that it's like Deja Vu. So many people on this website only care about Toyota becoming the #1 so they can pat each other on the backs and give hive fives. Meanwhile, the negative articles about Toyota have been mulitiplying over the last few months...I said countless times months ago that Toyota's quick growth was going to have consequences, and look what is happening now. GM is no longer weak...Ford is slowly coming around...Toyota has new stronger competition from the Americans and the free passes they received from the media for so many years are no longer being given out.
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Ridiculousness.
There's one big difference between Toyota vehicles and Ford or GM vehicles:
People actually
want to buy Toyota vehicles.
Malibu, Impala, and Ford Five Hundred (nee Taurus) are molehills compared to the sales of Camry, Avalon and such from Toyota. In the overall sales pictures, virtually NOBODY is buying these US-nameplate cars. Even though the Fusion seems to be getting good reviews, it's really just a Mazda 6 under Ford clothing, and its sales are still just a fraction of what Toyota and Honda are selling. Chrysler has actually made some desirable cars (though they're tanking on that with Caliber/Sebring/Avenger and their woeful designs), but they have been among the worst of horrifyingly-unreliable US-nameplate cars. And sorry for using the term "US-nameplate," because Chrysler is owned by a German company, and the US companies have been moving more and more and more of their assembly plants to Canada and especially Mexico. "US-built" just doesn't apply to these cars very much these days -- it applies far more to the Camry and the Accord than to the equivalents that GM, Ford, and Chrysler are selling!
Trucks are a different story, as the US companies can actually SELL some of them, but their huge SUV's are taking a big hit with gas prices -- wait and watch them bomb to abysmal levels once gas gets over three bucks a gallon this summer.
In the end, I'm not so sure that Toyota has had "rapid" growth or has "exploded" in growth -- it has been consistently selling more and more cars each year, in an attempt to meet the demand for its cars. Any "reliability issues" have had a lot more to do with the nature of an increasing percentage of parts assembled into a vehicle coming from suppliers rather than being built in-house, and the real comparison with US-nameplate vehicles will always be between Toyota's "legendary" reliability and the US-nameplates' reputation for being virtually the least reliable vehicles a consumer could choose to purchase. In the real world, some unnamed "loose trim pieces" in an auto enthusiast magazine don't compare equally to, for instance, the problem Chrysler pickup and SUV vehicles tended to have with shedding front wheels while under way on the highways, which hit the major TV newscasts and newspapers. And some people actually comprehend the difference between how Chrysler
FOUGHT the government in regards to issuing a recall for that problem, as compared to how Toyota
WILLINGLY has recalled vehicles to correct much more minor issues.
All the US-nameplates have to do is build interesting cars that people want to buy, and build long-term reliability into them. It's really very simple -- that's what Toyota has been doing all along. While I'm not so sure about "long-term reliability," the US nameplates
do seem to sell some very interesting vehicles overseas -- even vehicles with capable driving dynamics and other "foreign" characteristics. But, the genius-level-paid bufoons who run these US-nameplate companies just can't figure out that US consumers might like to buy "interesting" cars, too. While GM seems to be
finally "getting" this, Ford seems to have totally lost the point -- the fact that the "new" Focus won't be built on the highly-acclaimed chassis that Ford uses for the car and related vehicles in overseas markets, which has already been around
for several years, shows that the people in charge just simply don't even have a freaking clue. "Hey, let's rename the Five Hundred as the Taurus!" does disappointingly seem to be best that these sad excuses for corporate executives are capable of coming up with.
I'm sure not going to "reward" clueless, second- or third- or fourth-rate engineering with
my hard-earned dollars, no matter where the people who run the business live. If Ford goes bankrupt, GM slides farther downhill, and Chrysler sinks so low that it winds up being purchased by one of its suppliers, they will do so only because they have
EARNED their fates so well. In the end, people like me believe that Toyota will remain leagues ahead of the US-nameplate companies, and their several-decades-long record of horrifyingly poor reliability. I have no sympathy for these companies, nor the people who wind up getting stuck paying for any of their vehicles. Let's see them come up with three or four decades' worth of world-class, long-term, corporate-wide high reliability, and then I might consider laying my money down on one of their vehicles. They haven't even
started that, yet.
