That is by God right Laz.
Make something that costs people less in gas to run and is just as good, and people WILL buy it. Build something that doesn't have the power to haul a family and all their stuff and is a complicated maintenace nightmare and costs at least $30K new and don't whine to me about the American consumer.
Americans right now need a car that is 1. Fuel effecient. 2. Reliable. 3. Easy to work on if something does go wrong. 4. As inexpensive as possible. (The trend of having to haul your car to a mechanic everytime a little something goes wrong because its got computers in it that would put NASA to shame is bad IMO.) Instead, we get cars that have t.v.s in them, that lock themselves, that ring little bells if you want to leave the keys in the ignition, and are otherwise full of complicated crap that is mostly annoying and entirely a head-ache to work on.
wanting all of the above isn't too realistic anymore, unforttunatly. to get fuel efficiency, since the internal combustion engine is still very very inefficient, we need to add computer controls, to keep tabs of and constantly adjust fuel, spark, and in some cases, even valve timing. fuel timing is critical to efficiency in an injected engine. quite a few cars now, control the spark timing individually from cylinder to cylinder to help With mileage. THE fuel timing and fuel curve are constantly adjusted for the same reason. finally, the hondas mostly, and some mazdas and fords have variable valve timing. this is controlled through it's own computer.
with all of these computers networked together, there is nothing really simple if they break.
unfortunatly, simple is gone. even cars simple by todays standards are fairly complicated. if some people would spend a week doing diagnosis and repairs on these things, they'd get a whole new idea of what a mechanic/technician has to deal with.
you best defense against expensive repairs is to keep up with basic maintenance. you'd be very surprised at how many people will plunk 30k on a car, and then avoid the simplest of maintenance on that 30k investment.
