Comment Re:American car companies... (Score 1) 426
Audi, BMW, Porche, Volkswagen, Honda, Ford, Mazda, Mitssubishi, Nissan, Subaru, and Toyota weren't sitting on their thumbs in the 15 years it took GM, Ford, and Chevrolet to get their cars up to snuff.
Since Chevrolet is a GM brand anyway (and has been since the early 20th century), I'd assume that's redundant unless Chevrolet is run and/or seen as being significantly separate from GM's other operations in North America?
I specifically noted North America because I live in the UK, and your mention of those brands brought up and issue- the European market is quite different, both in terms of cars and in perception of brands. Chevrolet was virtually nonexistent here until the mid-2000s, when GM started using it for Korean-built lower-end models formerly sold under the Daewoo Motors brand (which they'd bought out). *That* probably bears little resemblance to what the brand is associated with in North America.
(The Chrysler brand is interesting in that- following its reintroduction in the UK and Ireland (*) after the Fiat takeover a few years back - they *did* use an all-American voiceover and American-style ads relating to their heritage... hinting at, but never explicitly linking it to America. Which is probably because the cars being sold as "Chryslers" in those ads were those sold elsewhere in Europe under the Italian "Lancia" brand! (**))
Similarly, Vauxhall and Opel, GM's "main" brands in the UK, and in the rest of Europe respectively (***) have a generally decent reputation, and even though Ford sells cars under its own name here, it doesn't have the generally-bad reputation it does over there. In both cases, this is almost certainly because most models sold by those companies in Europe are entirely different to the North American lineup, and also because they're generally either built in Europe or imported from Asia, not North America.
In fact, to some extent, it's not so much North America and Europe, as it is North America and the rest of the world. It's been pointed out that the North American car industry may be an example of the Galapagos syndrome relative to the rest of the world. (For example, I can imagine many Japanese cars being usable on British streets, but some of the larger American models would be massively out of place and impractical on smaller and twistier British roads).
But the tl;dr bottom line is that the repuation of such companies and their brands is often very different outside the US- often to their advantage!
(*) Chrysler apparently tried entering the European market in the 1960s, but- unlike GM and Ford- didn't succeed, and left in the late 1970s.
(**) Lancias were taken off the UK market after they gained a notorious reputation for corrosion problems in the 1980s- probably exacerbated by the climate here- and I suspect Fiat's decision not to use the brand here may still be for this reason, i.e. a European example of a hard-to-shake bad reputation.
(**) Vauxhall has long been to all intents and purposes just the UK counterpart brand for Opel cars- the models are virtually identical.