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Every American Car Brand Is on the Bottom Half of CR's Reliability Rankings

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Re: Every American Car Brand Is on the Bottom Half of CR's Reliability Rankings

#31

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

ArtDev wrote: post #14
rtpg wrote: post #5

This is a bit flame bait-y but I really feel like America is getting a super Galapagos effect compared to the rest of the world. Everything is super different and weird and kinda bad, and nobody seems to notice. I go to peoples houses in the US sometimes. Some of these houses are multimillion dollar homes. The doors are all terrible. The plumbing is crap. The furniture just feels bad. The cheapest studio apartment in…

Like how you have to adjust the water temperature everytime you take a shower in the US. It's a solved problem!

What’s that then?

I live in Western New Zealand (Tasmania), and we have to adjust the temperature too.

Re: Every American Car Brand Is on the Bottom Half of CR's Reliability Rankings

#32

Post by jacobush »

lgbr wrote: post #24
rtpg wrote: post #5

This is a bit flame bait-y but I really feel like America is getting a super Galapagos effect compared to the rest of the world. Everything is super different and weird and kinda bad, and nobody seems to notice. I go to peoples houses in the US sometimes. Some of these houses are multimillion dollar homes. The doors are all terrible. The plumbing is crap. The furniture just feels bad. The cheapest studio apartment in…

> Then you get to grocery stores, and you have to go to the “fancy places” to even get the baseline of quality you see in the rest of the developed world. All the chocolate is bad. While I agree with you on other points, I take issue with this. American grocery stores are a real treat when visiting. Produce is colorful, plentiful, and delicious thanks to American embrace of GMO's and subsidies for farmers. Raw ingred…

The corn economy in the US is highly perverted, and that is just the tip of an iceberg. Agreed somewhat about Lidl, I'd be very frustrated if Lidl was the only place I could buy stuff in Sweden.

Re: Every American Car Brand Is on the Bottom Half of CR's Reliability Rankings

#33

Post by lnsru »

kstenerud wrote: post #16
rtpg wrote: post #5

This is a bit flame bait-y but I really feel like America is getting a super Galapagos effect compared to the rest of the world. Everything is super different and weird and kinda bad, and nobody seems to notice. I go to peoples houses in the US sometimes. Some of these houses are multimillion dollar homes. The doors are all terrible. The plumbing is crap. The furniture just feels bad. The cheapest studio apartment in…

I'm inclined to agree. I've lived in Japan (5 years), in San Francisco (6 years), and now live in Germany. The food quality goes Europe -> Japan -> USA, with a sharp drop between Japan and the USA. I'm currently living in Leipzig, which still has bombed-out looking empty buildings from the time of the Iron Curtain (although things have finally been picking up over the past few years). And yet even here the infrastruc…

Infrastructure in Leipzig is awesome because it was newly created after joining Western Germany for the money from westerners. Infrastructure in Western Germany is crap! My wife uses subway in Munich and there is no week without complaining about delayed or canceled trains. Buildings of universities in Western Germany is a bad joke. University in Regensburg was literally collapsing while one in Dresden got many new buildings. It’s not fair comparison.

Re: Every American Car Brand Is on the Bottom Half of CR's Reliability Rankings

#34

Post by manderley »

lgbr wrote: post #24
rtpg wrote: post #5

This is a bit flame bait-y but I really feel like America is getting a super Galapagos effect compared to the rest of the world. Everything is super different and weird and kinda bad, and nobody seems to notice. I go to peoples houses in the US sometimes. Some of these houses are multimillion dollar homes. The doors are all terrible. The plumbing is crap. The furniture just feels bad. The cheapest studio apartment in…

> Then you get to grocery stores, and you have to go to the “fancy places” to even get the baseline of quality you see in the rest of the developed world. All the chocolate is bad. While I agree with you on other points, I take issue with this. American grocery stores are a real treat when visiting. Produce is colorful, plentiful, and delicious thanks to American embrace of GMO's and subsidies for farmers. Raw ingred…

Lidl is a discount supermarket. It's not about choice, it's about the lowest prices possible with a limited amount of variety available in exchange. There are plenty of other chain supermarkets that have the huge variety of flour (?) you crave.

And "colorful" doesn't mean tasty with produce, unfortunately.

Re: Every American Car Brand Is on the Bottom Half of CR's Reliability Rankings

#35

Post by mrtksn »

starpilot wrote: post #13
rtpg wrote: post #5

This is a bit flame bait-y but I really feel like America is getting a super Galapagos effect compared to the rest of the world. Everything is super different and weird and kinda bad, and nobody seems to notice. I go to peoples houses in the US sometimes. Some of these houses are multimillion dollar homes. The doors are all terrible. The plumbing is crap. The furniture just feels bad. The cheapest studio apartment in…

I could cherry pick examples from around the country to show exactly the opposite. There's a great Quora answer on this phenomenon, "Why do so many Europeans look down on 'American Cheese'?": https://qr.ae/TWJAc9

I was expecting to read a great Quora article but the author compared American speciality cheese to European supermarket fast serving cheese to prove that not everything made in Europe is superior.

What's next? Comparing an American ivy league university building to a newly built apartment somewhere in Brussels and prove that not everything is older in Europe?

Of course every place has all kind of extremes. I look down on West European cheese too because they don't have proper white cheese that is available in the Balkans and Turkey and when abroad I have to rely on low quality feta as a substitute and get depressed. That said, I am not going to claim that Balkans and Turkey have the best chease, it's just that the kind of the cheese I like is not available in western Europe in good quality and I am better of to stick with the local cheese(which is superior to the versions found in the Balkans and Turkey).

All those "country X is superior to the country Y" is inherently flawed unless you talk about specifics. Otherwise, all you do is some kind nationalistic masturbation.

Re: Every American Car Brand Is on the Bottom Half of CR's Reliability Rankings

#36

Post by justapassenger »

kstenerud wrote: post #2

It's interesting to note the difference in communication styles when company PR teams respond to requests for comments. Fiat Chrysler and Chevy both responded in predictable marketroid speak, complete with extensive use of passive voice and grand, hand-wavey platitudes "We care committed to blah blah blah" "Quality is of the greatest importance blah blah blah" "blah blah above industry average blah blah blah" "blah b…

Words are cheap.

They’re under investigation for possibly hiding recall and issuing OTA instead that surprised people with sudden range loss (https://www.businessinsider.com/nhtsa-investigating-tesla-up...)

They force customers to go over arbitration to fix yellowing entertainment screen on cars as young as few months. They tell people it’s normal wear and tear due to using cat in the sun (https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/yellow-screen-force-...)

Their service centers are over the capacity for years and cars can be stuck waiting for repairs and parts for months.

Re: Every American Car Brand Is on the Bottom Half of CR's Reliability Rankings

#37

Post by patrickk »

rtpg wrote: post #5

This is a bit flame bait-y but I really feel like America is getting a super Galapagos effect compared to the rest of the world. Everything is super different and weird and kinda bad, and nobody seems to notice. I go to peoples houses in the US sometimes. Some of these houses are multimillion dollar homes. The doors are all terrible. The plumbing is crap. The furniture just feels bad. The cheapest studio apartment in…

One of the small, but significant things I noticed about German apartments was the lipped 'bezel'[1], where the door and the frame fit snugly into each other and there is a rubber/plastic seal between the door and the frame. This is a big deal in an apartment, because it reduces noise, reduces drafts, and eliminates the need to heat more than one room at a time. Also, the door itself seems to be very solid, you'd have to hit it with quite some force to make a dent - none of this cardboard sandwiched between 2 slides of thin MDF nonsense. I'm not from the US, I've just noticed this in Germany coming from another European country with less quality interior finishings.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/InteriorDesign/comments/8ths03/germ...

Re: Every American Car Brand Is on the Bottom Half of CR's Reliability Rankings

#38

Post by tpush »

atmosx wrote: post #29
kstenerud wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm inclined to agree. I've lived in Japan (5 years), in San Francisco (6 years), and now live in Germany. The food quality goes Europe -> Japan -> USA, with a sharp drop between Japan and the USA. I'm currently living in Leipzig, which still has bombed-out looking empty buildings from the time of the Iron Curtain (although things have finally been picking up over the past few years). And yet even here the infrastruc…

I've seen others, Arianna Grande on a amateur video amongst them, complaining about the diff in quality between European and US street food being inconceivable .

Like, US street food being incredibly better or worse than EU?

Re: Every American Car Brand Is on the Bottom Half of CR's Reliability Rankings

#39

Post by CalRobert »

arethuza wrote: post #15
rtpg wrote: post #5

This is a bit flame bait-y but I really feel like America is getting a super Galapagos effect compared to the rest of the world. Everything is super different and weird and kinda bad, and nobody seems to notice. I go to peoples houses in the US sometimes. Some of these houses are multimillion dollar homes. The doors are all terrible. The plumbing is crap. The furniture just feels bad. The cheapest studio apartment in…

There are plenty of shoddy new build expensive properties in the UK - I've been amazed when looking at some new properties how poor the fit and finish is but they still sell.

Yeah, ROI (so not UK but similar in many respects) and I feel like the construction here is utter crap. Hell, houses are now being sold with 10 year structural warranties (rather short, that) because of a history of houses falling down because of pyrite. Nevermind that we always feel 20-30 years behind everyone else; god help you if you want a timber frame, or for that matter have a heritage building where the builders just slop cement on top of the walls (thus starting the destruction of the lime mortar).

The OP's comments remind me of how much nicer everything seems on the continent, groceries included (though increasingly everyone shops at Aldi/Lidl anyway)

Re: Every American Car Brand Is on the Bottom Half of CR's Reliability Rankings

#40

Post by Luc »

rtpg wrote: post #5

This is a bit flame bait-y but I really feel like America is getting a super Galapagos effect compared to the rest of the world. Everything is super different and weird and kinda bad, and nobody seems to notice. I go to peoples houses in the US sometimes. Some of these houses are multimillion dollar homes. The doors are all terrible. The plumbing is crap. The furniture just feels bad. The cheapest studio apartment in…

I think there is something to this, but in my experience they just don't care. Their stuff is optimized for their own cultural values, which you perhaps expect to be more like your own than they are.

I have had American visitors marvel at the (German built) windows in my French home, calling them something you'd see on a space station. On the other hand they think I must be having money problems for not having a tumble dryer (only poor people hang their laundry to dry) or not having airco.

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