[DeTomaso] NPC - Consumer Reports on Cars

[Ken Green]

While I was over 100K miles on a Buick Regal GS with virtually no work, my daughter knew the local Mini Cooper (BMW) dealer service folks by first name in the first year of ownership of a new Mini Cooper.
 
The dependability thing is wierd, and I think Buick had great ratings 10 years ago, but not as good now.  You'd think once they figured it out, it would be the new baseline.  I'm sure BMW did not build failures into the Mini Cooper, because they were all under warrenty.  
 
Personally, I blame it on the bean counters and managers.  Even in Aerospace, the managers viewed the engineers as plug in employees and figured if things were slow for a month, lay them all off and hire new cheaper guys with no experience when they needed them.  Maybe it's the same in Detroit?  If they don't value and develop experience, they are doomed to repeat past mistakes.  Does anyone know if the assembly lines folks and dealer mechanics ever meet with the engineers to develop better designs?
 
Ken
 
 

--- On Wed, 3/4/09, Steve Hawkins <shawkins777 at comcast.net> wrote:

From: Steve Hawkins <shawkins777 at comcast.net>
Subject: Re: [DeTomaso] NPC - Consumer Reports on Cars
To: JJD1010 at aol.com, detomaso at realbig.com
Date: Wednesday, March 4, 2009, 3:30 PM

Say what they want but there sure are a lot of foreign car repair shops
around for their cars to be sooo great.  I'm driving a 1999 Chrysler LHS
with almost 140,000 miles and haven't done much more than change oil and
put
gas in it.  Gets good gas mileage and is fun to drive.  

I wonder how much bias there may be because of not wanting to admit they're
having problems with they're Japanese car.
I've owned a couple of Honda's and they weren't without problems.

Steve 

-----Original Message-----
From: detomaso-bounces at realbig.com [mailto:detomaso-bounces at realbig.com] On
Behalf Of JJD1010 at aol.com
Sent: Wednesday, March 04, 2009 9:31 AM
To: detomaso at realbig.com
Subject: [DeTomaso] NPC - Consumer Reports on Cars


Consumer Reports Magazine just released their annual car issue in  which 
their subscribers report on problem areas for cars going back 5  model
years. Not 
to beat a dead horse, but GM and Chrysler cars have really bad  results. 
Ford's aren't the best but they aren't bad and some models are
pretty  good.
As 
usual, Honda, Acura, Toyota and Lexus are unbelievably good. The German
cars 
aren't as bad as GM and Chrysler but they aren't really very good.
 
As much as everybody talks about buying American, this really paints a  
pretty dismal picture of the American manufacturers. Quality is an
engineering  and 
management issue. It's no wonder they are failing in the marketplace. 
 
Jeff
6559
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