I used to agree on the reliability, but I am starting to question the reliability on the Toyota’s/Hondas of the world. Especially now where they want to make everything boosted or electric supplemented. Not good for reliability.
Also, paying 30k for a corolla is crazy in my eyes, but then again everyone has severely increased their MSRP’s when they had the “covid excuse”.
Corolla starts around 22k. Can get 500-1k off that.
I have people daily that went from Toyota to another car and come back to Toyota bc their car has been unreliable. Mostly trucks and suvs, domestic, ford/GM the most complaints I see.
Toyota def isn’t perfect and them being forced to deviate from their model to keep up with tech and energy improvements have had to sacrifice reliability. But they’re usually last to upgrade so they seem to try and figure out issues instead of being the leader for innovation.
Asian auto makers are killing domestics right now it seems and stock prices of them reflect that. Domestics are getting crushed by their ev segments
right that’s not hard to replicate.
Here’s a 24 Corolla LE at 1k off list and no MSD.
My question is who is buying this when a 24 Altima SL AWD is cheaper? I’m not even going to get started on how the SUVs / trucks lease. These leases are atrocious. Point re: dependability, etc, is moot on a lease, since car is under warranty for full duration of lease regardless. So what’s the selling point? Tell me why I should spend any time building a sheet and selling this junk?
A person from Bimmerfest, took his 2019 X3 to the dealer in the Bay Area (San Francisco) and the dealer quoted them $900 for an oil change and brake flush. I’m sure this happens at many high end dealers and those that want to own vehicles switch to Lexus or Toyota. I owed BMW for 30 years, with my wife having one now that we bought. Next vehicle will probably be Lexus or a BEV. I have a Highlander that I may buy out the lease. But the Toyota costs almost nothing to maintain. People get burned with the high priced dealers, specially if they don’t watt lease car after car.
There’s a reason Peter Pan BMW has a service center that is 2x larger than most showrooms.
What are they going to do if we fully transition to EVs? Replace cabin filters at 10000% markup?
He didn’t say lease. He said a corolla is 30k. You can buy it for under 22. And you would finance it not lease. Sell in 5 years for 15k+. What’s a Altima worth in 5 years?
Penny smart, pound foolish but people are shortsighted so I agree, not much reason to push most Toyota leases. The Altima is more suited for people payment shopping. Don’t sell them im glad to
is that down the street from Mickey Mouse Mercedes?
I wouldn’t say it’s entirely moot just bc the whole lease is under warranty. I wouldn’t want to bring my car in for repairs under warranty if possible. It being free to fix doesn’t make it any less inconvenient.
Also that reliability is correlated with other auxiliary stuff like the infotainment working IMO which can be a huge PITA .
People may also want to buy our car at end of lease. People ofc would prefer a more reliable car to a less reliable one all else equal, otherwise dodge, RR and Maserati would sell a lot more cars
Just because it’s about Toyota
https://www.wsj.com/articles/toyota-bet-technology-woven-planet-c5579beb
I tend to think Toyota is a pretty flawed car company but when you look at the competitions… you see how they have such a good rep.
No, it’s near skippy bmw.
(It’s actually in the SFBay area)
The last domino falls. Get out your wallets.
“It’s not immediately clear how much the labor deals will increase labor costs for the companies, which had argued that giving in to all of the union’s demands would affect their competitiveness and even long-term viability.”
I’m thinking it is clear enough, that the deep pockets are going to be affected… at least until those expenses are transferred to the consumer (which will be very soon). Some of these models are undoubtedly making money hand over fist. I’m reminded of this on the daily as I walk in/out of my garage with the nearly $100K JEEP sitting there. 
The starting wage of ~$28/hour, in addition to their other benefits, is quite crazy. The rationale of the entry-level employees making pennies on the dollar (in comparison to say the CEO) is somewhat irrelevant imo. Everyone would love to have millions of dollars thrown at them, but that’s how the world nor the system works. I’m not 100% defending the manufacturers, but their situation isn’t that unique. You will find similar situations with other conglomerates, if not all of them.
I think at some point I’d done the math on this and they were effectively asking for a 75% raise.
I don’t blame them given the true cost of living (not the malarkey propaganda numbers) seems to have gone up by nearly that much in the last 3 years.
It’s not the Asians killing them, it’s more the Europeans.
And it is because Ford and GM made bad decisions. GM made the terrible decision to pull out of Europe while pushing EV development at the same time as Ford became an also ran in Europe. While EVs might only make up 5.7% of US car sales, they are are 20%+ of new vehicles sales in EU. So if you are spending billions developing EVs you need to be selling them in Europe to amortize development cost over more vehicle sales. And this was totally foreseeable. EVs were always going to make more sense in Europe due to higher gas prices and much shorter distances driven - see the number one selling vehicle in Europe the Tesla Model Y.
Then there is also china, where EVe make up 30% of new car sales and neither Ford nor GM have a significant EV presence.
Automakers knew they have to develop EVs to do business in Europe and China over the medium term. But if Ford and GM weren’t planning on doing business in Europe or China I don’t see how the business case for developing and expanding EVs could make sense. The return on investment in the North American market was never going to justify the cost. And that seems to be pretty much where we are at.
I can’t blame them for trying to negotiate a better pay for themselves. I just hope that they know that there is risk of the automakers slowly moving their operations to the South or even to Mexico.
My wife and I also feel that inflation is much higher than what is reported, at least here is SoCal. I don’t know, maybe it’s lower elsewhere. I don’t know how people on fixed income are dealing with the inflation.
They all build a solid amount of their lineups in Mexico with no apparent drop in quality. Part of these agreements have protections against those moves (like a plant closure) but the average consumer has no idea that their Accord was built in Ohio or their Ford truck was built in Mexico. Or what the underlying parts content is.
Particularly with trucks there’s a lot of brand loyalty at play that drives most of the profits domestically but eventually somethings got to give if there are meaningfully less expensive alternatives from lower wage base companies. This happened in the 80s with all those Datsun, Mazda and Toyota pickups grabbing market share.
I think Ford already said their deal will add $900-$1000 to each new car.
Our Ram 3500 was built in Mexico and other cars/trucks we have owned were built there as well. Build quality has always been as good generally as anything else we had built in the US.