I just service a 1995 Escort with 300,000 miles. I also have a customer with a 1992 Chevrolet Caprice Sw.with 220,000 all original except it has had 2 Alts. and 1 water pump.My own Dodge Tk. has 238,390 miles on it I hated it because I had to change the valve cover gaskets on it. Don't get me wrong I work on a lot of junk on all sides you have to service them bottom line case in point I have a customer who has a 1997 Honda Accord that only had 97,000 miles on it I told her she had to junk the car because she never change the oil in the car. She went on to tell me that she just would add oil to it when it needed it. This car burned oil so bad it covered the front of the shop with smoke after just a few seconds of running. Remember they are all mechanical. Last thing a friend of mine has a new Nissan truck with 15,000 miles on it and I had to send him back to the dealership because of bad upper balljoints I am sure it is just a fluke. I do agree with everyone GM did it to themselves.There is nothing in there car line that I would buy. I do like the Suburbans I hope to get a nice Z71 Suburban sometime soon used of course.
I have always bought GM, specifically Chevy or Pontiac vehicles but my next car will most likely be an import. I don't like doing it but there are no GM made cars that I like with the exception of Cadillac...too costly for me. I have a new Impala which I drive everyday for work...it's a piece of unappealing junk and it is a loaded high-end model. I can get a much better styled/reliable car in a new Nissan Altima for less than a comparable Impala. I like the trucks, but way more money than I want to spend and the gas mileage is bad. I don't like doing it, but I will not drive something I don't like just to say it's "Made in USA" ...but then again...the Nissan IS made here :shock:
I think what ever puts food on the table is what you should buy. That's why I bought a 2001 Windstar, it's where I work. Runs great to. Ford is supposed to have an announcement in Jan. on their cutbacks. Many businesses will feel the trickle down effect from all these North American job losses from feeder plants to retail stores and every where else these people now spend money. The imports just keep on comming and the money keeps going overseas. You don't have to be a brain scientist to figure out who these import buyers support. Ray
Let me get this straight. You GM guys use Consumer Reports as a credible source of info in regards to the Regal being better then all Asian imports, but when I use it to show how bad domestic cars fair in the used car world, they are biased?!?! If you read the article, it doesn't tell people what to buy based on CR's recomendations, it lets 810,000 people do it for them. The article states that right at the beginning: So I guess we should assume that 810,000 folks must have either been brainwashed by the Japanese or paid off by consumer reports to talk down domestic cars. Anyone ever hear of Occam's razor? uzzled:
Gung Ho Remember this movie?? Lexus,Kia,Infinite,Dihatsu, wernt even around Chryslers best was the K car ou: This was fiction now its GM's reality 20 years later.Toyota will buy GM next year at the rate there going :shock:
87 Gn Tourqster is right. After the GN ate up the Vette, Chebby Div. raised all sorts of hell with the Corp. You would be suprized at how much pull the chebby Div has within GM. :blast: PONCH
I am deeply sorry to hear that these people are losing their jobs. I surely hope that they are soon called back to work. Let's hope so.
Good thing the CTS-V is not faster than the new Corvette or Chevy would have Cadillac disposed of :Brow:
Foreign vs. domestic....the never ending story of "my friends, wifes, aunts, cousin has a ....... and its never broke down and then the: my friends, husbands, uncles, cousin has a ....... and it never breaks down..." All car manufacturers make some crap cars or there wouldn't be service departments at every dealership! They aren't just there for oil changes! As for which plants are closing: --Oklahoma City stop production on the trailblazer early 2006 --Lansing craft center stop production of the SSR mid 2006 --Spring Hill stop production on line 1 end of 2006 --Doraville, GA end production at the end of 2008 --Moraine, OH slated to lose a shift based upon sales --Lansing metal center will stop production in 2006 --Pittsburgh Metal Center stop production in 2007 --St. Catherine's Ontario Powertrain components cease production 2008 --Fint North 3800 engine facility will stop production in 2008
Those of you that think my last statement was assinine,think again.For those of you that think foreign cars are better than American cars, I certainly hope you lose your jobs and then when the reality hits you smack in the head,maybe you'll understand the damage you did to the American car industry. It is a pretty sad situation when the American public says they are American,but would rather buy foreign cars. Where is your national pride? Consumer Reports gets paid off by the foreign car companies so they can get high ratings. I wouldn't trust that magazine by their ratings,and I've never gone by their writeups.
I don't think all foreign cars are better or all American cars are junk. But when you look dollar for dollar in a lot of cases you get a better product. And as much as I don't like to say it we live in a "world economy" and things are different. We have priced ourselves out of a lot of industry here. Remember when most TV's, appliances, and electronics were made here? Not many are anymore because manufacturers can't pay people $20+/hour to build a vacuum cleaner like they used to. And don't give me the "national pride" crap...I wear a uniform to work everyday... :af:
Maby Daimler will buy it...they seem to have the eye for what alot of folks want.....at least in the lower 48.
um, wanting a quality product and streaching your dollar is NOT unamerican, neither is having the FREEDOM TO CHOOSE WHAT YOU WANT. as many have said before...if others would put out a better product we would buy it. you can hammer on everyone and say they are killing america..no, the american car mfg's are killing themselves. as stated before, i will NOT pay more for less. domestic mfg's are gonna have to get a kick in the pants and start churning out some new, exciting, reliable designs that arent 20 years old. all they do is polish the same turd generation after generation. DC and ford are at least trying to get back in the market and have drawn in quite a crowd with new exciting, stylish, and FUNCTIONAL cars. GM still has HUA (head up a$$) syndrome and better do somethig fast. im not gonna have pride in a product that has as much appeal as the turd i flushed 10 minutes ago. your supposed to have pride in a QUALITY product, not any old thing you just throw out there. those of you following the kick of "you should buy whatever any american mfg puts out and non other" have already succumbed to their marketing. thats the age old sales trip they have used for so many years. "americans buy american mfg'd cars and youll buy whatever we make AND YOU WILL LIKE IT! if you dont, your unamerican.' and now the masses have stood up and said "now wait a minute, you have been designing cars the way that YOU want to for the last 25 or so years, we the consumer want a car designed for US and since you refuse to give that, we will take our business elsewhere." GM has pushed people to the limit and they have finally said "enough!" there is nothing american about that. if the domestic car mfg's (esp gm) wanna win back the minds and monies of their fellow citizens then they can do just like all the other foreign mfg's did and cater their production to what the consumer wants. and its been shown that ford and DC have been working on that tremendously. it all ammounts to the fact that people are tired of being sheep and tired of being told what they will get regardless of wheather they like it or not. so humor me even more with how great GM is and how its not their fault for what happening as they circle the bowl. plug your ears running around screaming "la la la, i cant hear you!!!" all you please.
Oshawa Plant #1 third shift ends mid 2006 Oshawa Plant # 2 to stop production 2008 These two plants are rated #1 and #2 in Quality in North and South America :spank:
I didn't DO any damage to the American car industry. Wake up Carl, fact is they are screwing themselves. Maybe the quality is back but the products still stink. I see Chrysler coming back strong, the built us a 350hp rear drive sedan. They are selling like crazy. What does GM have, the Impala, the LaCrosse. Get a grip man! Those cars are UNDESIRABLE to anyone but a brainwashed GM loyalist. I hope GM mangement gets a grip on the reality of this. Those workers got screwed by poor management decisions. It is NOT MY JOB to prop up companies that SCREW UP. It in fact would be un-American to support the rubbish they try to pawn off on us. GM needs to get with the program. The one GM car I own was built with style, quality and performance at a decent price. GM ruled the world back then by building cool cars. They don't have any cool cars anymore. They are doomed unless they start back on the road to building fun cars, and that means ditch the front drive for anything above the Cobalt. I frequent a bunch of car based forums, I even co-host on one. This is the only one I had to delete my car list from because I caught so much crap for owning foriegn cars. That tells me that there a bunch of folks with little or no vision of what the real world looks like. I am TRYING to buy American but can't make the sacrifice required. I would buy a new Z06 to replace one of my Porsches but it turns out the handling stinks. Power up the waazoo, no question, but the feel of the car is all wrong. Guess I'll just drop $5k on the SC kit and toast those fools in Vettes with my 15 yr old foriegn car some more. I have managed to buy American trucks. Nobody else does it right. I tried GM here again. I bought two new durapooch trucks, an '01 and an '03. Junk, junk, junk. I am now on my fourth new Dodge truck. Whatever the Germans did worked. No problems on three trucks racking up hundreds of thousands of miles. Couldn't say that for my GM trucks. I'm setting up camp with the crowd that INSISTS on a decent product for my money. The fact is GM doesn't have anything resembling that. They shall suffer. Unfortunately the workers, who were innocent pawns, are the ones who will REALLY suffer. Carl, if you continue to support GM because they are GM, you are part of the problem. Blind loyalty will only cause them to continue this bleak product line and eventually more people will loose jobs until the whole works goes belly up. YOU will be the one to blame, not those of us smart enough to support companies building what consumers really want. :beer
...and this is why GM is doomed to fail. They have been consistently making the wrong decisions for the past 25 years. For some folks to try and put the blame on everyone but GM is showing their blind loyalty to a company that has no regard what-so-ever for their customer base. We are seeing Ford and Chrysler attempt to fix the problem. They both offer, or soon will, several cars and trucks that I would happily own. Dodge even has a 300 horse Neon SRT-4 to go toe to toe with the current crop of Import muscle cars. What does GM offer us performance wise besides the mega buck Vette and Caddy? GM's answer is to downsize to attempt to regain profitability. It's doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that a company never grows by getting smaller. I don't see Toyota having to shut down plants to remain profitable, in fact they keep opening more in this country. It rips me apart to see what GM has become. They used to be the leader in both style and design for domestic autos. Now every one of their cars is bland, boring, under powered front wheel drive that looks the same as what they were selling in 1995, which wasn't exactly breath taking styling back then. A perfect example of GM being so out of touch with buyers is that SSR pick up truck thing. Retro styling is the big rage now. Most people unless they are in their 70s can't really relate to 30s and 40s styling. Don't believe me? Look at what old car market is the hottest. People loved the styling of the 60's and early 70's. Most agree it was the high water mark for both design and style for the big three. Chrysler and Ford realize this and are catering to what the market wants. GM...they give us a useless 2 seat pickup truck with styling out of the 40's that does nothing for most folks, how many SSR's have you seen on the road? Even their one shot at rekindling the GTO name is crashing and burning, because the car looks like a 95 Cavalier and shares nothing with it's former name sake besides having a V8 and rear wheel drive. Pathetic. :af: I have serious doubts that GM will correct it's self. I do feel bad for the many workers who will most likely lose their jobs, but on the same token, they should be seeing the writing on the wall and if they are smart they should be making some sort of attempt to ready themselves for whats inevitable.
I don't care what Mr Colorado GS thinks about the GM cars because he is right, but GM trucks are one of the best out there.I work one a lot of vehicles and these are one of the least I see for repairs other than the usual oil changes and tune ups. Could somebody tell me why some Toyota Trucks come with a Delco battery, Delphi sensors, and Harrison radiators. My cousin has a 2004 Toyota truck that he bought new this way. Foreign or domestic they are all junk. Let me drive yours the way I drive mine and they won't last. If you ask me they all look alike anyway except a few. I do feel the same way most of you feel about GM cars they have NO Style .
This is a major problem. It's not the lack of quality GM has in most of their new cars, but rather the fact that many jobs are going to be lost. For one, NO car company has made very many cars that really have intrigued me that much since buick was done making the GN's in 1987. Since that time period, I have only seen a few newer cars that I actually liked. Now that buick has quit making the Regals(I loved the GS model w/ the S/C 3800 series motor!) and discontinued the rivs a few years back, I don't see anything that intrigues me other than a corvette(I don't care too much for them anyways) which is hopeless since I will never have that kind of money to buy one with. ou: Plus, I have yet to see my buick strand me on the side of the road, or any of my friends' buicks strand them! :Smarty: I go for 3 main things in a car...for one, it must be reliable...2-it must have decent performance(and that doesn't mean 9 second timeslips, either)...and 3-if it does have any thing that needs repaired, I must be able to do it myself and can't cost me too much. My '76 buick century had 2 of the three things that I look for in a car...it had dependability(very reliable)...and it was easy to maintain and didn't ever clean out my wallet(it isn't hard to do that though! :laugh: ) It will now have all three of the things I look for in a car...reliability, nice performance(with the 1970 buick 350 I am putting in :Brow: ), and will still be easy to maintain. Even with a slipping trans., the buick would still get you around town w/ out any worries. Does that tell you about reliability? The 231 took some pretty hard beatings to it as well, and never once did it stop ticking. :Smarty: I will not buy anything but american, and when I buy american cars, they will be older than 1988, that's for sure. Unless I see a good later model regal GS or late model Riv that I like, I won't be buying a car above 1988 anytime soon. :Smarty: Sorry for the long rant.
