Stick a Fork in the US Auto Industry

A friend of mine bought a 2016 Fusion about three months ago which had come in off a lease and he has nothing but great things to say about including about the price and low APR financing Ford was offering on their used off lease Fusions. They needed a reliable, well equiped, and relatively new four door sedan for not a ton of money and a late model Ford Fusion fit the bill. He also saw well equiped two year old Hyundai Sonatas with around 40,000 miles being sold for just $10,000-$11,000 by Enterprise but he didn't want to buy a former rental car. The Fusions were lower mileage and not much more than that for a two year old car.

Interesting to know but their quality rankings in all the studies keeps going down. They don't last as long as a Honda or a Toyota probably because they aren't designed to the same standards.

I love Program (ex-rental) cars and promote them to all my friends looking at buying a vehicle. Both our Fusion and Flex are Program and both have been great. Let the rental companies eat the drive off depreciation. You get an almost new car that has been highly maintained.

https://www.enterprisecarsales.com/...-Hyundai-Sonata-Henderson-NV?campaignid=promo

I would consider that at least $2000 high too given the miles and the ugly color. I have seen white and silver ones for just under $11k with about 32k miles. When dealing with the car rental sales places it is important to check all their various locations because they are dirt bags and will have 2-3 thousand dollar price differences in different nearby locations but won't tell you about it. Their search feature on their website won't even show it unless you delete cookies and do a fresh search.

They are most certainly still dirty used car salesmen.

I trust my dealer.

Thought, does this mean Ford will have to go to Mustang for NASCAR?

Mistake #1.

Airlines play that browser cookie game too in order to hide cheaper faires from you.

Maybe. For some reason I just feel really good about the deals I get from [Anc's last name] Ford.

Maybe it's because I've known one owner all my life and the other 9 months earlier.

Or maybe it's because my cost is $0.

Either way, think I'll stay a loyal customer.

Ahh, nepotism. Carry on. Aren't there emissions issues with cars from Alabama getting registered in Washington or do they special order them for you?

I will give Tesla this: They are the only car company, and I mean the ONLY car company, that has such a loyal following that 400,000 people would put down a cash deposit on a car they had never seen even being told that, at best, it will be two years until they can get it. No other company has that level of demand or customer loyalty.

Morgan in the UK has customers buy the car before it is built and they have been making the same (more or less) three cars since the 1930's but Morgan only makes around 5000 cars a year so they are a low volume boutique business. Their owners are pretty fanatical but Tesla brings the same level of devotion out in hundreds of thousands of people per model. I mean, can you imagine that? "We haven't released the final specs and no one has seen the finished product but 400,000 have slapped down deposits and agreed to buy one two years from now."

Yeah, who ever heard of people plunking down money for a car like that? Oh yeah.

50 is way different from 400,000.

BTW I remember going to the Tucker Museum and while it was a pretty advanced car for the time it wasn't really all that advanced. Certainly not revolutionary the way Tesla's models truly appear.

Even if the company ends up running out of cash and getting taken over, the brand will not die any time soon, and several major countries have laws saying in not a lot of time they are going 100% electric for all new car sales. Tesla has done more to advance that goal than any other company to date especially by spending a fortune on R&D and them making it public domain for anyone else to use for free. Then there is the electric charging network they have built and are still building on six continents.

Future electric car owners, and there will be a lot according to the legal requirements of countries like China and France, will be built upon Tesla's vision. There is no way this brand just goes away even in a worst case scenario as it is just too damn valuable as a brand now. Especially given its millions of rabidly fanatical followers who are willing to buy anything with a Tesla brand logo on it.

I disagree. My 16 Malibu gets 33 mpg and is a mid size car.

Fifty is the number of cars built, the number of people who put down deposits on the cars was in the tens of thousands. Considering the lack of social media to hype one's self, and the smaller US population back then, it's pretty remarkable. Had it not been for that era's Alex Jones going after Tucker, he might have gotten the cars into production.

What "Tucker Museum" is this? There are a number of Tuckers in museums, but no Tucker Museum.

Yeah, what's revolutionary about a car whose primary focus is safety in an era when no one thought about such things? What's revolutionary about a car with a flat-6 that could outperform a later model V-8 powered car of a similar size and weight? What's revolutionary about a car that could have major components like the engine and transmission swapped out in less than an hour? Tucker was pushing the limits of what could be done with automotive technology in the '40s. Had he started out with the kind of cash that Musk had available to him when he started Tesla he might have gotten farther along. Remember, he was pushing for thing like fuel injection, disc brakes, moveable headlights, and hybrid technology decades before those things ever showed up in production cars. The company was also looking at putting turbines into cars, nearly a decade before Chrysler built its first turbine car in the 1950s.

Just because countries are pushing electric vehicles, doesn't mean that the Tesla brand will survive. There's nine Chinese electric car companies, who are looking to start exporting vehicles. Tesla might be able to beat them on quality and technology, beating them on price is going to be a whole nother matter.

Tesla has offered to allow car makers to use its patents, unencumbered by royalties, so far, none of the car makers have opted to take them up on it. (And while one might be able to make the case that companies like Toyota don't need to do this, FiatChrysler absolutely does, since they lose money on every one of their electric vehicles they sell.) And accourding to the most recent figures I can find, Tesla's sold about 250K cars, which is less than Nissan.

According to a former GM economist, consumers really do want vehicles with higher fuel efficiencies, but since the execs at GM didn't care, he suppressed the data. (The original article is no longer online, but thankfully, my post quotes the whole article.)

It was a private Museum in Nevada proclaiming itself the Tucker Museum because it supposedly had the most Tuckers in one place (it was, like, three) along with a bunch of memorabilia. As I recall the San Diego Auto Museum also has one as do a couple up in L.A..

The only museum in NV with a Tucker is the National Automobile Museum (formerly Harrah's Collection). The AACA Museum in PA has three on display (four, if you count the test chassis, which consists of the frame, seats, steering set up, and the 589 engine, along with the hydraulic hybrid transmission). The Tucker Club keeps track of the locations of all the cars and who their owners are.

I saw this one.

http://www.tuckerclub.org/tuckers/tucker-1007/

I think I sent you a picture, or maybe just posted in the photo thread.

That is now but what about in the 90's?

In the '90s, most of the cars were still in the hands of private collectors (being only worth a few hundred thousand and not the millions they are now). IIRC, the only person who had three Tuckers at that time was Dave Cammack (his collection is now at the AACA Museum). I know at least one family during that era had a deal with a museum, that whenever the family didn't want to use the car for something (like taking it to a car show), it'd be on display at a museum. It's possible that some of the cars were loaned to the museum for a special display.

I know I saw a self proclaimed Tucker Museum in NV in the 1990's with three car and several Nantucket cars. Some of the cars may have been borrowed or something but they were there.

$20 says he was shitfaced wasted and saw someone's matchbox collection in a pawn shop window.

You really are tiresome and stupid sometimes.

Lighten up, buddy.

....besides, nothing wrong with day drinking on your day off. It's five o'clock somewhere, right?

@Uncle Abert disagrees:

That's why I keep the Mighty Jeep. 40mpg to commute back and forth to work, Mighty Jeep for SHTF.

https://amp.cnn.com/money/2018/09/29/technology/business/elon-musk-tesla-sec-settlement/index.html

I am not sure Tesla without Elon Musk will survive much less prosper.

Tesla without Musk could likely do better.

Musk has visions, some would say great visions, but he has come to believe that he can genius his way through any problem and that isn’t true.

Tesla needs to grab someone from the auto industry. Get someone who has come up a bit through the industry but is in charge of research arm so that they have a background in both worlds.

B/c right now Tesla doesn’t lack for innovation. They got super innovative cars that they literally can’t build enough of.

They need someone who knows how you fucking build cars to take over this car building business so that they can build some fucking cars! It’s pretty god damn simple.

So Musk is like the Walt Disney or George Lucas of Tesla?

Our recently elected conservative government is taking care of that by removing emissions standards and testing.

Ontario’s emissions testing program for older passenger vehicles will be dismantled next year and replaced with a new system that will focus on heavy-duty vehicles such as transport trucks, the government said Friday.

The Progressive Conservative government said the Drive Clean program, which involves a mandatory emissions test every two years for cars and light-duty trucks over seven years old, is outdated and no longer effective.

In a news conference Friday, Premier Doug Ford said the program worked well when it was introduced in 1999 and but grew less useful as the automotive industry adopted more stringent emissions standards.


“Drive Clean was created almost 20 years ago but 20 years later, the family car now creates much less pollution. So Drive Clean has outlived its usefulness,” he said.

Only five per cent of vehicles failed the test last year, compared with 16 per cent in 1999, and the trend is expected to continue, the government said.


The Tories said a new program will be introduced to target emissions from heavy-duty vehicles, which they say have weaker emissions standards and get replaced less frequently.

“With the light-duty vehicle program gone, we will be able to better focus ... on the biggest polluters on the road: transport trucks and other heavy-duty vehicles,” Environment Minister Rod Phillips said.

“More vehicles will be tested and almost twice as many polluting vehicles will be repaired. This means tougher on-road inspections, stronger enforcement that will ensure owners are accountable and properly maintaining their vehicle’s emissions.”

The government said the proposed changes will be subject to a 30-day public consultation, and are scheduled to take effect on April 1, 2019. It further said the move is expected to save the province $40 million each year.

The previous Liberal government made the test free last year and proposed a pilot project that would allow the test to be carried out remotely through on-board diagnostics.


Drive Clean has previously come under fire for amassing multimillion-dollar surpluses, even though it was supposed to be a revenue neutral program. Ontario’s former auditor general warned in 2012 that could land the province in legal trouble, because it’s a user fee, not a tax.

Friday’s announcement was met with praise by some in the automotive industry and questions from some political opponents.

“Ontario is now in the mainstream, becoming the last province to eliminate their mandatory vehicle emissions program,” said Frank Notte of the Trillium Automobile Dealers Association, which represents more than 1,000 new car dealers in Ontario.

“No longer will auto dealers waste money on equipment and overhead costs, freeing up money to invest in their business.”

Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner said that while he can accept that the program is no longer as relevant as it once was, scrapping it is part of a pattern for this government.

“When you look at the list of things this government has done on the environment file, all you see are cuts. They have axed pollution pricing, clean energy contracts, energy retrofits and (electric vehicle) rebates, in addition to repealing climate change laws,” he said.


“The cancellation of Drive Clean might have little impact one way or another. But it is part of a larger trend of ideologically driven decisions that are out of touch with the future of clean jobs and prosperity.”