Does Ford not Like U.S.?

Does Ford not Like U.S.?

Now seriously, is it just me or does Ford not like its home country compared to the rest of the world? For years the cars Ford has sold in the United States have paled in comparison to the rest of the competition, including Mazda which Ford owns! This was okay for awhile because buying a Ford over the competition meant saving thousands of dollars, and buying a Ford never gave off a “I can’t afford better” vibe. The problem with their methodology in modern times though lies with the Koreans. Hyundai also sells cheap cars, but they now make good cars. So if you’re in the market for the best, Honda and Toyota offer cars made with superior quality, and if you’re looking for cheap and cheerful, Hyundai will happily sell you a car with a long warranty. Also, if you like buying American, Chevy and Dodge sell very similar cars, in spec and price, to what Ford puts out. As a result Ford has some major financial troubles due to their losses in the United States. So what about the rest of the world?

Ford isn’t doing too badly in the rest of the world. Does that mean the rest of the world likes the cheap cars Ford makes? No, they like the good cars Ford makes. For example the Ford Mondeo has been and still is one of the best selling cars in Britain. Wait, the Ford what? Ford doesn’t sell a “Mondeo” in the U.S.! That’s very true, and we don’t sell the Taurus to the rest of the world. From the foreign reviews I’ve read, the Modeo is a spectacular mid-size sedan and easily beats the Camry dynamically, and gives the Accord and the 6 a good fright. To add to this, the Mondeo is properly put together and lacks the massive panel gaps and nasty plastics that the Taurus suffers from.

Recently the replacement mid-size for Ford has been the Ford Fusion, which is really a Mazda 6 with poorer build quality and a disguise. Ford is trying to make a move in the right direction by up scaling their cars a bit to not look like a joke next to the competition, but why didn’t we get the Mondeo? Why did a company with financial troubles spend money developing a new car (albeit, developing around an existing design) instead of bringing over a car that they already know is good? It would have been explainable if the Fusion was created to tie us over until the next generation Mondeo (as seen in Casino Royal, as 007’s hire car) gets put into production, but once again the Mondeo is exclusive to the rest of the world. I have to stress the rest of the world part because the photo’s I took and included with this article are from Taiwan! Taiwan is an insignificant car market compared to the United States and yet they’re getting the good stuff.

The Focus is the only taste we have gotten of how good Fords can be when they’re designed in Europe (well the GT too, but not many people are capable of getting one). It was a good move for Ford to bring over the Focus instead of giving us another Escort, but this moment of intelligence was as short lived as a fruit fly. The rest of the world has gotten an all new Focus which shares its architecture with the Mazda 3 and Volvo S40. It’s a great little car which actually outperforms the Mazda 3 and it looks fantastic as well; in fact, when I was reading up on it a couple of years ago my friends even caught me saying, “When that comes out in the U.S., I think I might get one.” Unfortunately it never did, and instead of the new Euro-Focus, we got the old Focus with some botox shoved up its tailpipe. Then, Ford announced that there would be a new Focus for 2008, but that turned out to be a bigger let down than before. The 2008 Focus is once again a face lifted old Focus but with “suspension tweaks.” What’s worse is the fact that the new Focus no longer comes in hatchback form and is now uglier than a Ssangyong Rodius (look that car up, you’ll get a good laugh). I’m really surprised that no one on the design team said anything about how the car’s wheel arches make 17 inch wheels look like milk bottle tops. All in all, the United States gets a half assed remake of a ten year old car, while the rest of the world drives something proper.

To make things even worse, cars like the Ford Escape which are offered elsewhere in the world are actually better everywhere outside of America. My father actually owns an Escape in Taiwan, and he says that the rental Escape he drove state-side just felt like a different car altogether. I haven’t driven either Escapes so I cannot comment on that myself, but I have seen them in person, in detail. The build quality of the Taiwanese Escape was just plain better. Everything looked and felt more solid. This was especially true of the interior. American Escapes have the signature cheap plastics and panel gaps that American cars generally have, but the Taiwanese Escape had an attractive well put together interior with quality materials. Why don’t we have that here?

I’m sure some marketing guy or gal from Ford will be able to throw numbers and research data at me defending Ford’s decision to shaft America, but I wouldn’t care, largely because Ford is losing money in America. I just don’t understand why Ford doesn’t bring over its fantastic foreign car models and up its quality in order to properly challenge the competition. Sure, this may bring their car prices up a bit, but the reason why people are buying the relatively more expensive Hondas and Toyotas is because they’re just better. What Ford is doing is like a parent giving their child a cassette walkman for Christmas, and giving the neighbor’s kid the new iPod touch. The only way this would make sense is if that parent just didn’t like his/her own kid.

EPA mileage estimate changes

EPA mileage estimate changes

Due to numerous complaints about people getting nowhere near the mileage estimates posted on the sales sticker of their car, the EPA has decided to change things up. Essentially the same test is run on the same rolling road, except now the tests are done with brisker acceleration, having the AC on, and some cold weather testing is included. This has unfortunately caused some issues.

The first issue caused stems from the fact that almost no one knows that the EPA testing standards have been changed. 2008 model cars fall under the new standards and the 2007 models are still under the old standards. So if you’re currently buying a small car, and you drop into the local Mitsubishi dealership to look at the new 2008 Lancer, you’ll laugh at the mileage figure. 22/29? The Mazda 3 which develops more power gets 26/32! Naturally, if you care about fuel economy, you’ll exit the Mitsubishi showroom laughing like a maniac, and drop by the Mazda dealership to sign some papers. However, most Mazda 3’s are still 2007’s and the 2008 Mazda 3’s fuel figures are actually more or less the same as the Lancer!

Another issue occurs if you’re just replacing your old car. If you own a Toyota Camry, and you decide its time to get a new one, you might have a heart attack when you see the window sticker on the new car. I’m sure a lot of people will proclaim that technological progress is no more and ask the dealer, “Why is the fuel consumption on the new Camry so much worse than the old one?” Then after the dealer tries to explain that the mileage has actually improved, but under the new standards they look worse, the buyer might feel a little thick, or not believe the dealer and think it was all a part of some sales pitch to hide the truth. On a more practical stand point, this means you can no longer compare the fuel consumption of cars produced past the 2008 model year to older cars.

This all brings me to the main crux of this editorial. I personally like the idea that the actual mileage I will be getting is now closer to the estimates, but personally I don’t feel that was the point of the estimates. The fuel consumption estimates are a standard, like the kilogram, or the minute. In my mind I have a set idea of what is good mileage for a certain class of car, but now I have to reset it and redo my research before complaining about or praising a car’s fuel consumption figures. I never cared that most people couldn’t actually get 41 mpg out of a Corolla on the highway, I just cared that the Corolla put out superior figures compared to a Cobalt (just to serve as an example). Even after the estimation changes a Corolla will still get better mileage than a Cobalt, but now everything gets shifted over. Personally I never used the EPA mileage estimates for anything other than a shopping comparison with other cars and in fact there’s some small print on the window sticker telling you that’s what the mileage estimates are there for. An analogy to better explain what I mean involves people on a diet. So let’s say Jane currently weighs 160 pounds, and ideally she would like to weigh 115, because that’s what most women her height should weigh. Then suddenly, the scientific community gets together and changes the pound into something heavier than before. Jane suddenly weighs 115, but it still doesn’t change the fact that she’s fat.

Another point I wish to make is that it was always possible to achieve the mileage estimates put up in the past, just no one bothered to try. I for one have tried to drive in a relaxed fashion to see if my car could reach the elusive estimates of old, and I actually beat it! The trouble is, most drivers on the road are in a hurry and are a little too happy to slam their foot on the pedals. Contrary to what some people say, applying the brakes doesn’t use up fuel (I’ve heard this said by many people, and I have no idea where it comes from); however, slowing down means that you’ll have to spend more time holding the “gas” pedal down and that does use up your fuel. So if everyone drove like an elderly person and was less nervous on the gas and brake pedals while driving, they would get mileage closer to the old estimates. Sadly, this is not the case. Back to the diet example, only this time with a diet… If Jane decided to go on the Shuh Huqua diet, which promised to cut her weight down to 115 in four to six months, and six months later she weighed 145, she would be furious and say the diet sucked. Now let’s say the diet said to only eat salads with fat free dressing and to go jogging for at least a mile a day; and now let’s say Jane only jogged every other week, and every Friday ate hot dogs and cheese burgers. Naturally Jane won’t get the desired results.

If there is one thing I’m enjoying about the new EPA mileage estimates, it would be how it effects the hardcore environmentalist. The car’s hit hardest by this new mileage estimation system are the hybrids; and the big gas guzzling SUV’s and sports cars that I love as a petrol head, are hardly effected at all. It’s easy to see why too. A Prius has, as far as I’m concerned, no power. A dash to 60 takes the better part of your life, and after the other part of your life the car will top out at 100 mph. So, even if you’re not in a rush you’ll have your foot down all the time just to make the car move. Sports cars clearly don’t have this problem, so meeting the new “faster acceleration” part of the new EPA tests means pressing the throttle a tiny bit more than before. As for big SUV’s, these cars get such bad mileage to begin with that a change of 10% in the mileage estimates means a one mpg difference, which feels negligible.

So, the new testing standards have brought about a bit of confusion, the inability to compare the fuel consumption of a modern vehicle to an older one, and some headache to the environmentalists harping about how buying a hybrid will get you a million miles per gallon. In the end I feel that the new EPA regulations on fuel estimates is a waste of time, because the estimates should only be used for comparison purposes and the old regulations did just that.

Is owning a Hyundai no longer embarrassing?

Is owning a Hyundai no longer embarrassing?

I’m sure you’ve noticed that there are a large number of Hyundais rolling around especially compared to as little as five years ago. So what has changed?

To start, let’s talk about the Korean auto industry, which started out more or less as a protected monopoly of sorts. Korea places incredibly large taxes and importation fees on foreign cars, so unless you are ridiculously rich, a Korean car is the only car you can really buy. These taxes were set because they were necessary to ensure their citizens actually bought Korean cars. For instance, if you had a choice a couple of decades back to buy a Hyundai or a Honda for roughly the same price, I’m sure you would have gone and bought the Honda, simply because everything about it was better. The trouble with this policy is that the Korean car makers would probably make a shoddy car to make more money, and keep making shoddy cars because no one can afford to buy a foreign car. Fortunately the Korean government had a solution. Competition is the greatest motivator in business, and Korean car manufacturers were required to export a large quantity of cars to capitalize on this idea. What this meant was that they would face daunting competition in the foreign market, and if they did not try to compete by making a good car, their respective car company would simply die off.

Korean companies did originally make vastly inferior cars compared to their rivals, but they sold their cars at bargain prices in order to entice some buyers; and it worked to some extent. The downside though, was the image that was given off. If you drove a Hyundai, it meant you simply cannot afford better, and the exterior styling confirmed this to people who had no idea what a Hyundai is. This image worsened as time went on, since if you drove an old Hyundai, the paint was probably peeling off and black smoke exited your tailpipe.

Hyundai and their subsidiary Kia, decided it was wise to try and shake off the image of poor quality their cars had by offering the longest warranty on the market. Surely, if a car company gave you a ten year warranty, they had to be pretty confident the car will make it to the end of that warranty without exploding. This idea worked, since people started buying Korean, because it seemed like they had nothing to lose. By curing the quality concerns, this started Hyundai’s image building, but it did not cure the cheap, inferior car image.

In 2002, Hyundai restyled the Tiburon into a truly beautiful car, and despite what many people would like to think, it’s what’s on the outside that counts. There still weren’t many Hyundai’s around, but most of the ones you did see were Tiburons, usually with a teenager blasting loud music inside. The car itself was pretty good, except the V6 engine (which is unfortunately still used today) was rubbish. 2.7 liters 170 hp, and fuel consumption that would make an SUV driver happy (18/26). This rubbish engine problem plagued Hyundai ever since it started selling cars, but happily it’s all changed.

The 2006 Hyundai Sonata, with its Accord copying styling, was a major step forward for Hyundai. For the first time, the exterior of the car looked to be of quality and the interior, especially if you get leather and wood, rivaled the competition. Then the 2007 Accent, and Elantra (and the SUV’s) came out and they took the same step up in visual quality. If you line the previous generation Hyundai range against the current one, you will probably be staggered by the progress. Because of the revitalized styling, I’m starting to see Hyundai’s everywhere, even in the slightly wealthier parts of town. The engines on offer for the new Hyundais put out good figures too, which in some cases surpass the Americans, but are not quite as good as the Japanese. It now makes sense to buy a Hyundai, since they are cheap, reliable, well made, and reasonably good looking cars. Kelsey Grammer will even tell you on the television adverts that buying a Hyundai is just the smart thing to do.

To get back to the original question at hand, is it no longer embarrassing to own a Hyundai? I think so, the new ones admittedly. Hyundai’s don’t give off that sense of cheapness they used to, and since they build a good car and sell it for less than the competition, (as opposed to building an inferior car and selling for less) no one can really make fun of you for making a poor car purchasing decision by only thinking with your wallet. I’m not saying that everyone should run out and buy a Hyundai over every other car in the market (they’re not THAT good), but I believe that owning one now is no more embarrassing than owning a Toyota, i.e. it isn’t.