A lot of people have been suckered into thinking American cars are inferior, even after the tens of thousands of recalls if not millions. I have never made my decisions on what other people say is the best. I judge for myself and have had many very fine cars throughout my life. People can buy Jap and German all they want. I’ll stick to the USA.
Let me give you some concrete examples of the stupid engineering in American vehicles that you apparently never heard of; they are absolutely inferior at many times.
Right now, one of these is sitting outside the building I’m in; it belongs to a friend of mine and I’m helping him with it. This was literally the best car GM knew how to make in the 1990s.
https://www.flickr.com/gp/160772509@N03/D2q918
It features the Gen II version of the venerable small block Chevrolet motor, the LT1. This LT1 shipped in Camaros, Firebirds, Corvettes, Caprices, Roadmasters and of course Cadillac Fleetwoods from 1992-1997.
And every 30-60000 miles you get to drop about $1500 on it - because it WILL die and leave you stranded by the side of the road. Why? Because GM thought it was an excellent idea to put the super advanced, water intolerant distributor *BELOW AND BEHIND THE WATER PUMP* right on the front of the motor! Yup, the water pump drips onto the distributor (called the Optispark) and you get stranded. Worse, you can’t do a tune up without removing the water pump. That’s right, you can’t even get the distributor cap off. Oh, and if you don’t use the special tools to change the water pump drive seal (it’s driven off the cam), you get coolant into the crank case and have to start all over. And some of them would die if it rained hard enough and you were going fast enough because the early ones didn’t have any sort of drain and there was no O-ring seal around the cap or anything.
https://www.hotrod.com/articles/ccrp-0603-opti-spark-tune-up/
Here is an LT1 with the water pump removed so you can see the Opti:
http://diysrc.com/wp-content/uploads/h20off.jpg
And with it on, so you can see how buried it is:
http://www.grumpysperformance.com/LT1Front.jpg
NOBODY else in the industry was this stupid. And GM shipped this in millions of cars.
This was by far not the worst example of stupid domestic engineering. I have way more.
Here’s an example of both bad engineering and bad customer service. In the 1990s Ford began to phase out the classic small block Ford V8 in favor of different versions of their new modular overhead cam V8, usually in 4.6L flavor, initially in their higher line vehicles. After a few years they started making cheaper versions for run of the mill base Fords like the F-150, Mustang, Crown Victoria, etc. Well, they decided that they were going to make the intake manifold completely out of plastic. Annnnd that they were going to run coolant through it. And that they were going to use a particularly cheap plastic. Well, turns out that plastic didn’t *like* having coolant running through it and it would fail. Either it would fail by developing leaks (and since many of these Fords didn’t have a coolant temp gauge or coolant level light, you could cook the engine before you could tell it failed) or it would just explode in a gout of steam one day.
http://www.agcoauto.com/content/images/engine/ford_4.6L_intake_problem_areas.jpg
Ford decided that despite the fact that it was a safety hazard and that it was happening in and out of warranty so it was clearly defective, they would only replace those under warranty. For those out of warranty, you were screwed - unless you had a fleet Crown Vic, in which case they would quietly replace your intake manifold and the average consumer could go screw themselves. They eventually got sued in a class action lawsuit for that one.
Don’t have to take my word for it, though:
http://www.agcoauto.com/content/news/p2_articleid/185
https://shop.advanceautoparts.com/r/advice/car-technology/the-big-problem-with-fords-46-v8
Again, nobody else was dumb enough to do this with their intake manifolds, and few import marques need to have class action lawsuits filed against them to fix blatantly obvious problems like these.
Or how about the 2007 Chevy Silverado pickup with the 4 speed auto that should have had all the bugs ironed out of it due to being in production for so long and prior ones having been pretty good, yet Edmund’s review example kept blowing up and all the dealers said that this was normal?
I can keep going. Lots of people have very good reasons to find American vehicles inferior in general. Especially people like me who have given domestic engineering a chance and found it wanting over and over and over.
I just finished getting a 1989 Bronco with the classic 5.0L/302cid engine running again. The harmonic balancer is horribly engineered. It consists of a two piece design - a central pulley that bolts to the crankshaft and a weighted ring inscribed with the timing marks to tell you where top dead center is, etc. These two are completely separate and they are pressed together at the factory by a rubber strip that causes an interference fit between the two. In the below picture, you can see how this sandwich is made, complete with the crumbling rubber strip between the two rings.
https://ww2-secure.justanswer.com/uploads/working4ev/2009-10-15_084502_1.jpg
Weeeeeell, after a few years and a few dozen thousand miles, that rubber strip starts to degrade. And suddenly the outer ring, the one with the timing marks on it, the one you need to be dead accurate to make sure your ignition and cam timing is on target... isn’t. It’s rotated independently of the crank and now could be any amount of degrees off. (Never mind that the balancer is now throwing the engine out of balance and causing damage there too.) In many cases, the balancer can start moving off the crank and detach from the pulley entirely.
When Ford went to the 4.6, they used a similar design for the crank pulley on that engine but didn’t use the balancer weight as the outer ring - instead fitting the serpentine drive pulley that way. Yup, it comes apart in even more spectacular fashion.
NONE of the import marques from this era or later was stupid enough to not lock their balancers/crank pulleys together. Only the domestics do this sort of crap.
Yeah... Lots of people have had lots of horrific experiences with domestics. We don’t feel like enabling Detroit’s continued failures - when they build a better car (and sometimes they have, but not often - the first gen Fusion comes to mind as it was the first Ford to be better than the Camry in reliability) we’ll buy it but they have to make a better product *first*.
Here’s another example. I posted it to a different forum, so pardon anything that seems a bit off. I live in Dallas, Texas of which Arlington, Texas is a suburb. Arlington is where these Cadillac Fleetwoods were made.
***
Came across some amusing if anecdotal evidence of just how bad General Motors was (and to some degree still is) this past month.
Recently found a clean but wrecked Fleetwood in a local junkyard to donate cosmetic parts to {my friend’s} Cadillac.
https://farm1.staticflickr.com/931/43520799351_2d03922d4c_z.jpg
It still had the documentation pack and there were records in the car indicating that the single owner since new (found insurance card in the car valid through 7/2018 and the original buyer certificate, names and addresses matched) had been a GM employee at the Arlington, Texas assembly plant where these Cadillacs were made *when* these cars were made. He’d even left his mirror hang tag in the car.
https://farm1.staticflickr.com/935/29967309068_0059ea59bd_z.jpg
The documentation seems to indicate it was either a demo car or the guy liked his company car so much he bought it.
https://farm1.staticflickr.com/933/42028865630_a11eeb7187_z.jpg
A little more than two months and three thousand miles later, the car went into the dealer. The owner thought the incident so noteworthy that he retained it in the documentation packet.
https://farm1.staticflickr.com/861/29967191728_93d685aac8_z.jpg
https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1814/43119974194_c82e27fe32_z.jpg
If you can’t read the archaic dot matrix printing, I’ll copy it here.
REINSTALL RIGHT QUARTER LOWER BODY SIDE {MOLDING}, FELL OFF, PART IN TRUNK, WARRANTY
CAUSE: IMPROPER INSTALLATION
The right quarter lower body side molding is a large polished stamped stainless steel sheet metal slab; I’ve marked the part on this picture of {my friend’s} Cadillac. It’s a fairly substantial little piece.
https://farm1.staticflickr.com/942/28900996517_c78e98df08_z.jpg
GM Kwalitee - so good that even a GM employee, presumably a manager of some kind, couldn’t get a good example of the best, most carefully designed and meticulously assembled car GM could make at the time, ***which was made at the plant he worked at and could hypothetically supervise the assembly of***. Instead he ends up with a car that large slabs of metal *just fall off of* because GM workers couldn’t be bothered to screw the car together properly.
***
Gee, I wonder why people stopped buying domestic.
