GoddessJ and I watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report every night that they’re on. (They’re really the only shows that we watch, we mostly use the TV for watching DVDs and playing the occasional PS2 game.) The only real complaint that we have about it is the sheer mind-numbing repetition of the ads. We retaliate by making jokes about them. (“Where else can you see fashions like this?” a recent and oft-repeated ad gushes. “At the Goodwill store,” GoddessJ retorts.)
But there’s one ad we’ve been seeing for the last week or two that caught my attention. It’s for Ford cars, and it features a couple dozen people, all saying — regularly, repeatedly, and repetitively ad nauseum — how Ford’s quality is now equal to Toyota’s.
Japanese-based automakers have only two quality advantages over American-based ones. They’re designed to last (no “planned obsolescence” for them!), and they test each part before putting the car together. Parts that don’t make the cut get rejected, period. American-based automakers have historically just thrown the parts together and did some basic testing on it afterwards, and if they can drive it onto a truck, it gets shipped to the public. I don’t know whether that practice has changed, but I have my doubts — testing each part is time-consuming, and “time is money.”
On the other hand, a little Internet research turns up a surprising fact: the claim seems to have a kernel of truth to it, at least for “initial” quality (i.e. problems in the first ninety days that a customer has the vehicle).
Would I buy a Ford because of it? Hell no — at least, not until their vehicles have proven to be as high-quality and long-lasting as the two Toyotas that I’ve had. And that’s going to take some time to prove, since my current one (a Corolla) is now thirteen years old and still going strong. You can’t even tell its age by looking at it. I’ve seen too many American cars that are rust-buckets at half that age, and I’ve heard too many horror stories about expensive mechanical problems with them after only a few years.
But it’s nice to see that at least one American car maker is trying to match the Japanese in quality. I might even be persuaded to buy a Ford car… some day. 🙂
My Dad got a Ford after his relatives in Dayton, OH, a town with all of the big three auto makers (some of them work for Chrysler) got angry at him for driving a Mazda. There they take “buy American” seriously, drive a foreign car into a big-three automaker’s factory parking lot and your tires will get slashed.
Most “foreign” cars in the US are actually made in North America. And you might be surprised at how many “American” cars are actually made in Mexico or Canada. And the parts can come from just about anywhere in the world.
An “American car” simply means that the company that built it was incorporated in the US. Nothing else.
If your father wants to gamble his money on the claim that US automakers have improved, that’s his prerogative. I’ll wait until I see how they hold up over the long haul.
He was pretty happy with his Escort, of course, the Escort was half-Mazda really as far as the parts go, which is why it’s good. 😉 (This was about a decade and a half ago, I don’t know what he drives now as when he visits he arrives via train. BTW, I know two of my half-siblings now own Japanese cars.)
You know you can watch the Daily Show and the Cobert Report ad-free? I used to get The Daily Show on iTunes before it became available for free on its own website, and the Colbert Report is similarly available. Lots cheaper than paying for cable when I don’t care about TV anyway.
Yes, and we’ve used that when we’ve missed an episode. But I have to pay for cable anyway. I’ve tried to convince GoddessJ that it’s not cost-effective several times, but she insists that we have it regardless.