2002 Toyota Tundra SR5 from North America - Off Topic Comments

It's the company HQ that gets the profit from the vehicle sale, regardless of where it is made. If the company is foreign based, the profit is heading to another country.

The point made by comment 10:29 has been made repeatedly on this site.

American industry brings profits to America. Japanese industry funnels profits OUT of the country.

13,000,000 people are directly or indirectly employed by and get their living from the American auto industry. Every time a Honda or Toyota is purchased, it takes money away from our fellow citizens. Even if imports were more reliable (and no substantiated data indicates that they are) I would still refuse to buy one.

What difference does it make as to whether corporate profits goes from one country or another? Do you know where a lot of the profits US car companies makes goes? Into the pockets of the upper-ups. That's right - into their pockets, and not to the workers on the line who are merely disposable whenever the price of fuel gets hiked up and nobody can afford to buy the gas guzzlers they produce.

Did you know that one of the GM execs actually pilots his own personal helicopter to the office every day? That and he actually owns to Czechoslovakian fighter jets in his private collection? I kid you not. I'm sure he's thrilled that some of you are so happy to fund his toys and extravagant lifestyle at the expense of all those GM retirees who now have to give up many of their retirement pensions and benefits as a result of poor management and shoddy product development.

Some of you seem to be thinking that if you buy American - then all of the money goes to the worker. All I can say is that when Toyota moved a new plant to KY - which is our neighboring state - they offered salaries that were far higher than what the avg salary of the region was at the time. The same for the Nissan plant outside of Nashville, or the Honda plant in Ohio.

For the many families who work in those factories, they get good pay, good benefits, and they get to have stable, comfortable homes working at a stable, high quality company that makes wiser decisions in regards to appropriate product offerings instead of focusing entirely on cheap, high profit, truck-based SUVs, only to have to shutter those same plants once the price of gas caught up.

These are AMERICAN workers. That they work for one company or another is no difference. That is unless you really care more about whether the upper up is Japanese or American.

Let me tell you another thing. GM, Ford, and Chrysler haven't been exactly honorable in regards to US labor to start with anyway. If it weren't for the unions, I can almost guarantee they would cut and put all their plants in Mexico, South America, China, and so on. For decades, the big three have made every effort to shut down US factories in favor of building cars in other countries. These three companies should be grateful that so many Americans seem to think that by buying a US-branded car that they're supporting their fellow man. If some of you knew the actuality, perhaps there wouldn't be so much flag waving.

The number of U.S. citizens employed by Japanese car companies in the U.S. is absolutely a drop in the ocean compared to the number that are directly or indirectly employed by domestic makers.

As for executives salaries, I seriously doubt that CEO's of Japanese companies live like average middle class folks either. ALL CEO's of most companies make obscene salaries, whether in the U.S. or abroad.

I did consulting work for a relatively small company some years back, and the CEO asked if I wanted his pilot to pick me up in his helicopter. Helicopters are hardly a rare thing for most companies doing work over a broad area. No one is naive enough to think that ANY worker makes even a tiny fraction of what any company head makes, regardless of the country.

The point domestic owners try to make is that the U.S. auto industry employs over 13,000,000 people, and to wish for the demise of domestic car companies is little different than wishing for some catastrophic disease to wipe out a huge number of our citizens. It will have effects that ripple through the entire economy as well as destroying the lives of those workers.

Our economy, like our ecology, is inter-dependent on many things. There is simply no way that I could bring myself to wish for the destruction of the lives of a large percentage of the people of Japan, and I find it a little scary that there are, apparently, American citizens who would actually wish such a catastrophe on our OWN people because a myth propagated by ad hype.

10:44 Well, as an American, owning imports has put money IN to my pockets, because they in fact are more reliable, and the evidence surely does exist, whether or not you believe it.

Since I wised up, many years ago and stopped buying junk from the Big 3, my repair bill, covering FOUR imports over 17 years, has been exactly $90. ONE starter put in my former Tacoma at nearly 100,000 miles. If I have to put a starter in a Toyota every 100,000 miles for the 3 or 400,000 I know I'll get out of it, that's just fine with me. Beats having a head gasket or transmission go out on a Chevy or Ford at 70,000 miles, if that. I don't buy that garbage any more, and never will.

Granted the small specific Tacoma may be a reliable vehicle in your case, but many owning small import Japanese sedans have had engine sludging woes, transmission failures, airbag issues, braking which is relative to them to the individuals who have bought them. Own a few new import sedans and the larger Tundra lately, and then share some broader ownership comments.

10:57,

Nobody is wishing ill on the American worker. But the fact is that we are a free trade country with an open door policy in regards to what we buy. This in essence gives the US consumer access to the best choice of the best made products.

The tone of many US brand owners seems to be that somehow, companies like Toyota, Honda, and Nissan played an unfair game. But the truth is that they created superior products for decades while the big three were asleep at the wheel. Perhaps this is no longer the case and their products have improved. But they burned too many people's bridges for too long to make that much of a difference.

I will say that at least in GM's case, they are going in the right direction. They realized that in order to win back the kinds of people who buy Hondas and Toyotas, they would have to beat them at their own game. The new Volt coming out in a couple of years could be such a product. I also think their job on the new Malibu is also admirable. If I were in the market for a family car, I'd probably go with that car.

But don't blame people who buy Toyotas for being un-patriotic or somehow desiring to bring down the US auto industry. Again, if GM and Ford had spent the last 30 years making competitive, reliable, innovative products to keep up with the Japanese competitors, then we probably wouldn't be having this conversation. Consumers have a choice and their buying preferences are often accurate in portraying which products are the best choices.

We are also no longer a manufacturing centered country. To say that we must do everything to prop up this aspect of our economy is a losing argument. Simply put, the US is more like the UK, which itself was once the largest manufacturing country in the world, only to later cede that title to the US, who is now ceding the same to China and perhaps India. Perhaps an equally patriotic thing to do would be to go to college and get degrees that prepare our youth for the future and realistic service and research atmosphere of the US economy.

I consider myself to be very patriotic. Yet I own a Japanese car and truck because I think they are still one of the more reliable choices to be made. That doesn't make me a bad person.

And I was paying $30.00 at the Honda dealership for oil changes every 3000 miles. Guess I should buy a Toyota instead or drive 3000 miles a year to get my $90.00 value. And if I could have gotten 70,000 miles on just one Honda transmission, I would be in heaven on my last mistake. I'll take the 100,000 mile warranty and have.

There is not now, and never has been, any truly reliable data, such as frequency of repair records, that indicate imports are any more reliable than domestics, past or present.

In addition, anyone who has not so much as sat in a domestic in SEVENTEEN YEARS is hardly qualified as an "expert" on the reliability of domestics.

I have never replaced an engine or transmission in ANY domestic vehicle. As for repairs (other than brakes and other routine maintenance) my Dodge cost me a whopping $8 in repairs in 240,000+ miles (one heater hose). None of our Fords has ever cost us over $40 in repairs in 100,000+ miles, and my family's Buick LeSabre cost exactly ZERO in repairs in 277,000 miles.

Using the same reasoning as the commenter who has not sat in a domestic in 17 years uses, I can just as easily staunchly maintain that imports are crap (which, in my opinion they ARE).

There are those here that make it sound like the economy of the entire United States is based on U.S. automakers. What the Big 3 do or don't do is a tiny blip on the radar in the grand scheme of things, so no one is going to convince me into buying junk from them ever again.

It's a matter of their philosophies. Ford, Chevy, and Dodge, in their earliest days, made good vehicles. As time progressed, they made billions of dollars, and with no foreign competition. Then, the fact is, they got greedy. They started cutting corners as much as possible to pocket more money on each car sold, and still charged the same prices.

Think about domestic cars made in the 70's, 80's, and 90's. The 80's were the low point. Domestic vehicles were absolute disposable junk. A decade or two before that, foreign automakers like Toyota and Honda saw this, set out to make well-crafted, rock solid vehicles that offered American auto consumers a much better car, and that's exactly what they accomplished.

Park ANY domestic vehicle from the 80's, or a decade on either side of that next to ANY Toyota or Honda. The huge difference in build quality is obvious, and should embarrass the Big 3, and did. So people starter buying them, and those foreign companies grew to the stature that they continue to build today.

Only now, after making decades of pitiful junk, when threatened by foreign companies, do the Big 3 just BEGIN to give some thought to long-term reliability in an automobile.

You domestic owners out there buying new cars have Toyota and Honda to thank for the fact that they aren't as terrible as they used to be. If not for them raising the bar, you'd still be driving crap like mid 80's Cavaliers and so forth. At least with the Camry and Accord setting the standard for the last decade and a half, there's at least a chance that the Big 3 will recognize how a car is supposed to be designed and built, and maybe even start trying things the right way. They have yet to make anything that's close, but at least they're improving.

The longest lasting vehicle of any kind that we ever owned was built in 1975. It went over 300,000 miles with virtually NO repairs. It was a Ford.

The biggest nightmare we ever encountered was an '89 Civic. It started having major problems at 40,000 miles and was sold to a junk dealer with just under 100,000 miles on it with a blown engine.

Our Japanese-built Mazda managed only 85,000 before numerous problems forced us to trade it (for a Ford).

Our Toyota Celica was very reliable for 100,000 miles, but was more expensive to service and repair, and was traded 100,000 miles (for a Mustang GT) because we didn't find it any better built or reliable than our domestics, and it was basically pretty boring.

In almost half a century of driving all sorts of cars, nothing has ever given me any indication that any import is better than any domestic, past or present.

Excellent comment. Very well written and RIGHT ON Point. Toyota is heading right where US big 3 were. Complacent attitudes will lose Toyota market share. Just try to buy one. The Toyota dealers are arrogant and lack service. They will lose in the long run.

I also agree that imports have become crap and not what they were. No import owner seems willing to go over to consumeraffairs.com and actually read where I am coming from. I went the other direction to domestics, only because engine problems and transmission issues on late model Japanese imports is unacceptable. I am not about to buy a larger Tundra either.

The world economy and who flies helicopters and jets around has no bearing on why I now drive new domestics. It was taking a very loyal import owner and not having the prior level of quality as before. I went down the street and bought

2 new domestic vehicles within a 8 month period. The import dealer I had will perhaps take notice or perhaps not with our limited amount of vehicles. But maybe they will miss the dozen or more new vehicles they use to get from us over time. Quality and service is what retains customers; the import myth is over in our household. The honeymoon is over.

Gosh, if Camry is "setting the standard" we'll all soon be driving the new and improved Yugo.

17:24 How would you know about what happens if you try to buy one? Did you? Sounds like you're a staunch 'domestic' owner... why were you trying to buy a Toyota then? Maybe when you found out that Toyota dealers don't have to bend over backwards (like GM salesmen) to sell their cars, you were upset?

Here's the deal: you can't buy a good car like a Toyota for the same price as a rattletrap GM or Ford. Toyota salesmen don't HAVE to deal on price, because people know what great cars and trucks they are, and will pay Toyota's price to have one rather than a few thousand less for a domestic car that will accumulate half (or less) as many miles before it sits in a junkyard. If you want quality, you will pay for it. If you don't, go buy a GM.