Re: Consumer Re****ts reliability survey for Cars

"Mortimer" <me@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message 
news:MLOdnXPWqIaCohXVnZ2dnUVZ8tSdnZ2d@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> It's strange which cars are and aren't sold in a given country. It's
only 
> very recently (maybe the last five or ten years) that American cars such

> as Cadillac have been sold in the UK.

The case of Peugeot and Renault are different than GM. GM and Ford have 
always manufactured and sold cars in Europe, which are tailored to the 
European market. A lot of Ford and GM cars sold in the US are 
inappropriately sized for the European market, where gas prices are
double, 
streets are narrow, travel distances are shorter, etc. Of course many of 
these same cars are now inappropriate for the US also, now that gas prices

have increased.

Peugeot and Renault both suspended marketing in the US, not because the
cars 
where inappropriately sized or featured, but because their cars simply
could 
not compete in terms of reliability compared to Japanese, German, Swedish,

or even American cars. They left the US market for the same reason that
Yugo 
left, the cars were junk. The same was true of Fiat, but to a somewhat 
lesser degree. In the 1970's I almost bought a used Fiat 124 coupe (a
great 
car) but could not bring myself to pull the trigger because they had so
many 
mechanical problems (and at the time I had little money for repairs).

Perhaps Peugeot and Renault are improved now, but there are still way too 
much competition in the US for the French automakers.

One reason that US cars like Cadillac are now appearing in Europe is that 
they have produced smaller and more sophisticated models in recent years 
(some of them with sheet metal actually designed in Italy), and more 
im****tantly, the price has been slashed by more than 50% due to the 
weakening of the US dollar against the British Pound and the Euro. Nothing

strange about that.