" wrote in
:

On Mon, 30 May 2011 17:35:31 -0500, Jim Yanik
wrote:

"Ralph Mowery" wrote in
:


"Ed Pawlowski" wrote in message
...

"harry" wrote in message

om ...
Heh Heh. Finally catches up with where Europe and Japan were
fifty years ago.


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/30/bu...auto.html?_r=1
&s
rc=un&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fjson8.nytimes.com%2Fpag es%2Fbusiness%2Fi
nd ex.jsonp

.

The car makers are not catching up, the consumer is. Detroit built
small car back in the 60's. I liked my '62 Corvair. Then the
Pinto, Chevette, Horizon, Vega, etc, but they just never sold many
of them.

The American cars did have the small cars as far back as the 60's.
Just none of them were any good. The larger ones were not any
better.
I had a Ford , 3 Chrysler products , and 2 GM products. None of
them
made it to 80,000 miles. The last one was a 74 GM product and I had
to put two timing gears in it and the transmission went out at
75,000. I have only bought Toyotas for the last several cars. One
went 100,000 with only standard maint. Traded it off for a Camry
and put 190,000 on it and only changed one sensor. Just put tires
on a Tacoma truck at 45,000 and no unscheduled maint.

Glad RonB's wife has a better memory as to why not to go American
than he seemed to.

I hate to buy from another country,but if the American stuff is
junk, I am not about to help the big wheels in the US make the 100
million plus dollars a year for doing it
.





How many Pintos and Vegas do you see around these days,as "antiques"?
You do see a few Corvairs,but none of the others. They were all crap.

I see a *lot* of vintage Mustangs. 64-1/2 models are quite valuable
and they aren't that rare. There is more to a valuable vintage car
than age.

the first Mustangs were a sports car,not an economy car.It had a V-8.
The very first ones were also firetraps,worse than the Pintos.
there was no metal barrier between the fuel tank and the passenger
compartment,any rear end collision resulted in the fuel filler breaking and
gas spilled into the trunk and passenger compartment.

the Mustang IIs economy cars of the 70's were recognized as junk.
Later,Ford "redesigned" the Mustang to bring the pony car back closer to
the original. It was actually a whole new car platform,not related to the
Mustang II.

--
Jim Yanik
jyanik
at
localnet
dot com