Originally posted by red99sesport:
You know what, look at my sig. I drive a 2005 Corolla LE built at NUMMI. That car has better fit and finsish than the Lincoln Continental my dad traded on his Mazda 3. It isn't the American worker that can't built a decent car, it is the Beancounters running GM and Ford who can't. They should just give their engineers realistic constraints and let them do what they know to be right.



When you've got to pay more for your parts and pay more to have the thing built, yet still have to provide a car cheaper than the competition, you've got to cut costs somewhere.

Ford could sit and copy the Accord bolt for bolt, material for material, but in the end it would cost them an extra $3,000 to make that car than it does Honda purely because of the people who put it together. Built into every car made by Ford there is $1350 in healthcare costs alone; Honda only has $120 in healthcare costs to pay per vehicle.

And since most people are inherently not willing to pay as much for a Domestic as an Import, Ford not only has to struggle to produce a car for the same cost as its' competition with an extra $3000/car in overhead, it must actually produce in even cheaper than the competition. And when you've got to shave some $5000 off the cost of producing a vehicle, about 1/3 to 1/4 the cost of production, the beancounters and engineers have to get to work. If anything it says a lot that they've managed to produce vehicles even remotely comparable to the competition when they have to produce them for so much less material cost.

2003 Mazda6s 3.0L MTX Webpage 2004 Mazda3s 2.3L ATX