"Go Buy a Car!"

[staticengine]

A post on the Daily Kos this morning had me thinking about the automotive industry a bit, and how reliability drives down demand if people are satisfied with what they have. The first car I drove was an '87 Jeep Cherokee, and it was fine for college, but I treated it like crap, and thus, by the time I realized it needed regular maintainance, it

Comments

[yougimmepanda]

I find it annoying that in this economy, Mercedes Benz and other high-end car companies are trying to get people to buy products that LEASE for over $400/mo. What the hell are the payments like then? I think it's reprehensible that companies focus on the holidays for purchases of that magnitude.

I got a Hyundai, and I like it. Since it is less than 5 years old, and comes with a 10-year warranty, I see no reason to run out and purchase anything else (not to mention the fact that I couldn't afford it anyway). The concept that having 'x' or 'y' car can make you a 'better person' has always made me sick to my stomach - in other words, people who buy cars because of an image are douchebags. I can understand getting something that appeals to you, but these companies appeal to people's insecurities about themselves, and I think that's wrong. Then again, I guess MOST advertising tries to accomplish that.
If the car industry hadn't been cranking out cars like Mormon women crank out kids, they wouldn't be in this position. They built bigger, not smarter, and now there are a shit-ton of gas- guzzling, overpriced, pieces of crap sitting on random lots that will most likely remain unpurchased.
Meanwhile, the heads of these companies will give themselves another raise after the bailout, smoke their cigars, and pat themselves on the back for a 'job well done' for getting all that money from the federal government. :p

[staticengine]

these companies appeal to people's insecurities about themselves, and I think that's wrong. Then again, I guess MOST advertising tries to accomplish that.
I think that way about every womens magazine. But then, music magazines aren't much better, since they're all about telling us we need "piece of gear-X" to be the hot new thing. I haven't bought a single piece of new music gear since canceling my subscription to Sound-On-Sound and Keyboard.

They built bigger, not smarter, and now there are a shit-ton of gas- guzzling, overpriced, pieces of crap sitting on random lots that will most likely remain unpurchased.
I think the auto companies really missed the boat on redefining their own industry. They went for the quick buck and the quarterly boost when the SUV craze was going on when they could have been investing in alternate fuel and seeding the idea that hybrid was the way to go in the future.

I'm hoping the computing industry isn't making the same mistake with all of our server-based technology; it takes a lot of electricity to run all those servers.

[yougimmepanda]

Yeah, they really could have taken more control over themselves, instead of trying to push soon-to-be-obsolete technology on the world.
It's stupid to me that companies don't seem to care about alternative technology - think of all the jobs that could be created! But they don't seem interested, and I'm guessing it has something to do with oil lobbies - I could be wrong, but....

[marc17]

I don't think it was really a quick buck. They've been able to outsell foreign competitor's trucks since the 70's due to tariffs on such (which they got SUVs to count as). Since they had the price advantage, they made that their main concentration. Now that trucks really aren't desired, they're in trouble.