A trip to an expensive hotel/restaurant on the Eastern Shore revealed some trouble for American automakers. The customer parking lot contained not a single American-brand car. Jaguar, Ferrari, Porsche, Volvo, Mercedes, and Audi are apparently able to sell cars to people who have enough money to buy what they want. There were a couple of American-made pavement-melting SUVs, including a Hummer H2, that made me wish I’d had some “I’m funding Al-Qaeda one tankful at a time” bumper stickers printed. But slightly smaller Japanese SUVs such as Acura and Lexus were more popular.
There were some shabby old American cars in the adjacent staff parking lot. But basically if the fad for monster SUVs dies down it looks as though the American automakers will be slugging it out in a pure price competition with Hyundai and Kia. This is going to be brutal for their shareholders. Perhaps the shakeout will hasten the debut of the $3000 Chinese car.
Fortunately for the US economy both Volvo and Jaguar are owned by Ford. I couldn’t say how much of the Ford parent company is owned by non-US parties though.
I am constantly amazed at whats considered a small car whenever I head to the US. A friend in NYC who drove a SUV said her father drove a small car – which turned out to be a stationwagon! Even here in Australia, land of long long straight roads there are way more compacts which are mostly of European or Japanese origin although both General Motors and Ford do pretty decent compacts which means they’d probably survive any reaction against big cars in the US. I’ll believe that when I see it though. It seems to be bred into US genes that big cars are good.
The stock market reflects thishttp://biz.yahoo.com/ic/ll/carmfgmkt.html. Toyota’s market cap is the same as its next 3 rivals combined.
What is an American car? My last two Toyotas (the best cars I’ve ever owned) were built in the US. The Dodge Colt I owned 15 years ago was built in Japan. Which of those is the American car?
After owning two Toyotas, including my current 2003 Corolla, I’ll never buy any other brand. My next car will probably be a Prius.
Seeing all the small, private airplanes at the airport made me wish I’d had some “I’m funding Al-Qaeda one tankful at a time” bumper stickers printed. I gather they use up more juice pr. hour than SUVs.
While most private airplanes use a lot of fuel when operating, I’m willing to bet that Philip uses less fuel in his entire lifetime as a private pilot than a soccer mom with an H2 uses running her kiddies to and from karate practice.
Lol, that’s a funny sticker. Personally, i’ve been wanting to have this one made up for the same purpose:
“Powered by the Blood of the U.S. Marine Corps”
My Diamond Star gets about 20 miles to the gallon as it moves along at 150 mph. The old Continental-powered Piper Malibu from 1984 gets similar mileage yet manages to go more than 220 mph, has pressurization so that you can fly at 25,000 feet above sea level, air conditioning for those hot sunny days, and de-icing equipment on the wings, prop, and windshield for climbing up through ice-filled clouds. The Robinson helicopter that I’ve been flying lately is closer to an SUV in efficiency at about 11 miles per gallon.
The planes also go directly from Point A to Point B and therefore travel fewer miles than would be required by road.
What is impressive about private airplanes being more efficient than SUVs is that virtually no money is invested in engineering these things. My plane has a 50-year-old engine design. The Robinson helicopter was designed by one guy (Frank Robinson). Car companies manage to spend $billions engineering each new vehicle and yet they are less fuel-efficient than cars from 20 years ago.
What a silly question Phil. The people at the restaurant were DC folks. We are the last demographic that anyone in the US uses as a typical population. Go to a restaurant in Buffalo or Peoria. People there drive Chevys.
Besides Jaguar = Ford, Volvo = GM, Mercedes = Chrysler.
You should be carrying around bumper stickers printed from http://www.changingtheclimate.com/ for these occassions.
In the future I don’t think we’ll have “automobile makers” We will have automobile designers and then they will use contract manufacturing to assemble the automobiles.
The death of the American auto manufacturer has been predicted many times before, but every time the Big 3 have bounced back. Take the numbers on their face, the fact is that GM & Ford’s combined pickup truck (not including SUVs) eclipse Honda’s total sales on an annual basis. You are also forgeting that the American manufacturers do a pretty good job at leading the market with new products (sure, they blew it on hybrids), but look at the minivan, the retro car, SUV’s (love ’em or hate ’em, every manufacturer in the world has decided that consumers want ’em), and now performance sedans and station wagons. The last point is particularly interesting because Europeans were thought to own that market, but you would be shocked to learn how many MBZ customers are ditching their E class sedans for the new Chrysler 300 sedan and the Magnum wagon.
Bottom line, not only are the Big 3 producing a lot of cars, they are beating their rivals at the quality game (GM placed several brands in the top 10 ratings of the JD Power long term quality ranking, while Mercedes slipped dramatically out of the top 10), have exciting designs, and are implementing some good technology (e.g. OnStar). Finally, several industry analysts reported that for 2004 the average price of a U.S. vehicle actually dropped by 1.5%… so not only are the U.S. manufacturers doing all of the above, they are doing it while lowering prices for customers and that’s always a good strategy for success.
“The American manufacturers do a pretty good job at leading the market with new products …”
Errr, I could be wrong – I’m no expert on the car industry – but:
“look at the minivan”
–> If you’re talking so-called people carriers, Renault Espace, 19eightsomething…
“the retro car”
–> Japanese, but they pretty much kept it to themselves. Err, not a good example, but how about the MX-5 as an MG rip-off? The emerged, what? About 1987?
“SUV’s”
–> Range Rover, 1970.