The thing about American cars is that there's no guarantees on consistency. That 4-liter Jeep six-cylinder is a prime example: there's hundreds of those things that will run hundreds and hundreds of thousands of miles smoothly and without extreme work. But there's also hundreds of those things that are going to cause unbelievable problems before 100,000. Japanese cars tend to be well-liked among logical non-brand-loyal people because they're price competitive and they have guarantees of consistent reliability. The engines are simply NOT unreliable (in large part - when I write this I'm thinking of the current Civic sedan), and people know this. The problem is that more recently, American vehicles have become more and more reliable (I'm thinking 97-03 Chevrolet Malibu now), but people still identify "reliable" and "Japanese" unless they know something (and the vast majority of car buyers are uninformed know only what they've been told in the past).
The truth is, no-one can argue that for a long period, American cars were unreliable trash, as recently as ten to fifteen years ago - it's going to take America still more time to recover from that.
The truth is, no-one can argue that for a long period, American cars were unreliable trash, as recently as ten to fifteen years ago - it's going to take America still more time to recover from that.
