I don’t think I posted here but I did on my livejournal, about our vehicular state of affairs. Last week we had to junk my husband’s car, and we’ve been debating back and forth about buying another one, trying to survive with one car, buying a used, or trying to find a car at police auction and, of course, what brand and type of car to get.
Along those lines I was interested to find out that Ford is historically low on the estimations of US buyers. We had not been thinking of a Ford ourselves. We’d been thinking of perhaps another Buick like mine or going foreign and getting a Toyota, as we have several friends who have had very good track records with the Japanese models.
I was wondering why that was. My husband’s car was a Ford Crown Victoria. His police department uses Ford’s as their squad cars, as have several others. To the point that if he was driving home from work still in uniform people would slow down for him just based on the look of his car, not even noticing there were no lights on the top of it, or that it was purely black and not a black and white car.
As Rip remarks on Automobile Haven you wonder what is going on with Ford’s that people aren’t trusting them any more. We had so many problems with that Crown Vic we had, true, some of those were caused by the fact that the car came from our relatives up North and had been ripped apart by rock salt, but overall the experience has left a bad taste in our mouth, couple that with the fact that several of our friends were constantly having to repair their own Fords. My former co-worker’s spent more time in the shop than in her driveway; and our friend’s who got a Toyota recently replaced their Ford after the third time it was going to cost them $800 to fix back to roadworthiness through no fault of their own.
My Dad used to be a Ford mechanic, and for the longest time he would purchase NOTHING but Ford cars. He had a long on-going argument with several of his friend’s who were Chevrolet people. It spoke volumes to me when he replaced Mum’s Ford Escort with a Buick Skylark and got a Chevy truck for his own use. He still buys American, at least, but not Ford.