[AUdubon5425]

Originally Posted by Username1

Whenever someone says american cars have improved I always go to google and type in the model and the word problems. Then the truth comes out. I have seen top gear and its quite funny, and he can expose the faults in low end cars pretty well. When I was a kid I had a 73 and 72 rustang. I loved it but it was made to die. When I think of fords I always say If you can't see it they don't paint it. That and really stupid assembly methods made that car and most since then designed to be junk.

Every car had different weak points when it came to rust back then. But if you want to go back to the 1970's, well I guess it helps to have had hands-on experience, but nothing rusted faster or more extensively than Japanese cars in the 70's. The Vega is the only American car I can think of that matched them. You have a better chance of finding a CT-100 than a '75 Subaru.

One of our guys had a pinto, it was mush better car than the newer escort '81 4 speed HO which you could not use in 4th on the highway unless you were going down hill. And this car was one where some driveways you had to go up backwards to make it.

Well there was something gravely wrong with that car if that's true.

Daewoo, Sanyo, and espically Hyundai are growing increasingly successful companies. By comparison GM Zenith RCA have declined and gone away. Competition killed them. the USA truthfully can't compete globally. Because by comparison our products suck. They have sucked for years, and they suck by choice.

It's way more involved than that. And holding up Hyundai as some kind of role model, well, just look at their resale value.

In the past when you wanted a car, or tv, you went to the dealer and got the one you wanted. You paid the price for the set, the dealer to exist, and the service option when you needed it. Forign tvs, cars, showed we could not compete globally. Local big box stores showed little shops could not compete locally. The word "compete" is the enemy. Without comparison we would not know about quality or price differences. When you guys write about the decline of Zenith (my favorite american brand) and I look at the old advertisements posted here touting the hand wired chassis, I really can't see a reason why they decided to go down hill..... Competition made us all chase cheap stuff, and the loss of jobs kept it that way. Thats all I can think of.

Why not search Google's News Archive for Japanese color tv dumping - say from 1965 to 1985. Then you may understand that the Americans did not have an inferior product.

When me and my brother got to the point when we could get a new car, (our first new car) we always thought it was gunna be a new 5.0 mustang. Around '92 and while standing there at the dealer looking at 20 of them on the dealer lot the majority had front fenders that did not line up with the doors. GM's Quad 4 was junk, and I wanted a good 4 because my old stang got 9mpg with the original carb. Not to mention if you drove a few of those 91 stangs they all drove different some were ok, others could not go straight and you always had to fight it. I was quite disgusted that there was no good american car choice. But now with several hondas well over 300K on the meter I will never look at another car.

Well, a proper rebuild and tune would have yielded more than 9mpg out of a compact like a Mustang. I got 13-14mpg out of my Lincoln Continentals from that era. I'm glad you've had good luck with your Hondas. I owned a Honda Civic once, and it was the biggest piece of junk I've bought out of 30+ automobiles. But I'm not ignorant enough to make blanket statements about Honda or Japan based on my lone experience with the 11th Honda built for 1981.

I am a news junkie and keep up with all that I can get my ears on, and I really can't understand how we chose to embrace low quality stuff like LLoyds radios, Yorx, GPX, the Daewoos, over the honda quality builds of a 60's - early 70's Zenith.

Well, a Lloyd's radio (which wasn't a bad brand overall) cost half of what a Zenith did. If you only had $20 to spend on a clock radio you bought the Lloyd's instead of the $45 Zenith. You've always had bargain-line products throughout time in every market.

On top of that I think that decades of GM Ford crap gave people a quite different outlook on brands like hyundai...