Foreign vs. Domestic, Pt I - The Quality Myth

OffHisMeds has a friend who swears by Consumer Reports. As with many other American consumers, it's like a religion for him. So when Consumer Reports says - endlessly - that Japanese cars are of a Higher Quality than American cars, it is a given that American consumers must worship at this altar, even for decades, until Consumer Reports says otherwise.

Unless, of course, Toyota shoots themselves in the foot and disproves the premise themselves. Running out of fingers to plug into the dike, Toyota was this past month inundated by Consumer outrage. Turns out that Toyota has been killing and maiming their customers with unsafe cars for at least a decade, and covering it up to boot. So where has Consumer Reports been on this problem, which dates back to the 90's? How about the NHTSA (National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration)? How about my friend?

You can almost guess his rebuttal, in which he simply regurgitated the party line of Toyota: "The defective gas pedals were manufactured by CTS Corp., an American firm". I burst that bubble for him by documenting that a) Toyota's problems started five years before CTS produced a single part for Toyota; b) that the Sudden Acceleration problem cut across much of their product line, including numerous models not equipped by CTS; c) that Toyota had previously blamed floor mats for much of the past decade; d) that Toyota had made the nonsensical claim that an epidemic of Sudden Acceleration could be blamed on a part (the gas pedal) that even Toyota admitted simply had a tendency to "stick"; and e) that they had completely failed to account for how it was that a so-called sticky gas pedal or floor mat could not only cause a car to accelerate out of control but also disable a braking system specifically engineered to kill the accelerator. My friend had no answer, but he did have a comeback: "Oh yeah, well what about the Ford Pinto?". Give him credit, at least he had one. Toyota and the NHTSA, by comparison, were either mute or dumfounded.

This pathology has roots in America that run long and deep, and nobody is more afflicted it seems than most of my friends. Having conversations with them about why it is wrong to blindly purchase foreign cars is like playing Whack-a-Mole: crush one Talking Point, and another will rear up to take its place. These Talking Points run the gamut - from the fiction that foreign cars are superior in economy or safety to their allegedly greater durability - but they all have two things in common: 1) they are articles of faith for many American consumers; 2) most of these "consumers" didn't even bother investigating an American alternative.

Full Disclosure: I am an unapologetic "Buy American" kind of guy. I would purchase an inferior American product in order to support American workers and our way of life. I'm not OK sending my money to Mercantilist Cheats like Japan, China, Germany and Korea that game the system to block our Exports, even as they feast on an open American market. And to the extent that any of them practice Democracy, it is vastly inferior to America's version, and they ought not to be subsidized at the expense of The Real Thing.

Fortunately, I don't need to purchase an inferior American car. With the exception of low-end economy cars (which represent a relatively small percentage of the overall market), Made-in-the-USA iron is generally the equal of any in the world, and frequently superior to anything in the world. And thus my confusion as to my fellow citizens' obsession with Honda, Toyota, Lexus, BMW, Volkswagen and Hyundai. There's a detachment from reality that is troubling.

Which brings us back to Consumer Reports, and an anecdote. I purchased a Pontiac Vibe in 2004. The Vibe is a collaboration between Pontiac and Toyota, and Toyota produces it's twin, the Matrix. The engine blew at 60,000 miles, and I had to spend $3,000 getting a rebuilt replacement. Investigating the matter, I found that the Toyota engine in the Vibe/Matrix is notorious for blowing up at 60,000 miles. Imagine that. Such a short engine life has been unheard of in American cars since the 50s, and Consumer Reports would have been all over an American car company that produced such an inferior product.

So where was Consumer Reports on this Toyota defect? Where were they on the decade-long Sudden Acceleration problem? Silent and in the background, as it occurs. Having gone to all the trouble of perpetuating the myth of the superiority of foreign cars, they are apparently unwilling to take the credibility hit they so richly deserve.

In the meantime, I look forward to the day when I will no longer have to endure the Pinto Argument as a rationalization for buying a foreign car, particularly since two generations have come upon the Earth since Ford produced that unfortunate vehicle. I also look forward to the day when either Consumer Reports becomes the unbiased advocate they represent themselves to be, or American consumers start thinking for themselves instead of having Consumer Reports do their thinking for them.

Or both.