mac davis wrote:
On Sun, 25 Nov 2007 20:23:51 GMT, Brian Henderson
wrote:

Precisely. They succeed because they want to succeed, they're
hungry
for success. You get a lot of American companies who think that
because they bother to open their doors in the morning, they
deserve
success and the world will beat a path to their door because
they're
Americans.

Ain't so.

As I understand it, the US automakers thought that as long as they
changed the size and shape of the tail fins every few years, people
would continue to want and buy the "latest model"..
The Japanese spend a couple of million bucks (a huge amount at that
time) doing market research and found that what a large amount of
the
folks that were interviewed in the US wanted was an affordable car
the was reliable and didn't cost a lot to run... 180 degrees from
the
Detroit marketing plan..
Look at the cars today (ok, except for the suv/yuppie assault
vehicle) an it's kind of easy to see who was right..

Not quite. Cars are smaller today because of laws put in place to
encourage improvements in fuel consumption, and SUVs are in fact
primarily exploitation of a loophole in those laws--they fill the same
nice that station wagons used to fill.

None of the current generation of cars are "affordable" by 60s
standards--you pay more for a basic econobox than you paid for a Rolls
or Ferrari in 1960 and inflation is not the entire reason. As for
reliability, that is mainly the result of the emission laws that
require that cars pass emissions at 50,000 miles, but also is the
result of the nearly universal adoption of electronic fuel injection
to meet emission standards and the improvement of seals and lubricants
that occurred in industries only indirectly related to automobile
manufacture. Neither of these is the result of competition from
Japan.

And the popularity of SUVs, which fill the luxury sedan/station wagon
niche but exploit a loophole in the fuel economy laws, suggests that
the American public wants large cars when they can afford to own and
run them.

--
--
--John
to email, dial "usenet" and validate
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)