Surprisingly, Ford had the highest-ranked models in the family car segment with their Ford Fusion Hybrid and Ford Fusion V6 models. This vehicle beat the Toyota Camry and Honda Accord, which do not usually lose in this segment. However, Toyota led in five other segments, but scored only an average rating on their popular Prius model. This was a decline from last year. Toyota’s major recall on the brakes of the Prius caused it to score significantly lower than usual.
As the Japanese and most of the American automakers strive to the top of the charts, the European luxury brands were in a different category. BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Audi performed very poorly. In particular, BMW had five of 11 models ranked below average.
The overall comparison ranked Scion as the best brand and Chrysler as the lowest-ranked brand. Unfortunately, Chrysler has not undated its model line to meet consumer demands and it has not improved like Ford and GM. I expect Chrysler to create even more of a financial deficit than it already has in the future and I am sure that it will run out of business within the next ten to fifteen years. Ford and GM have shown that they are taking the initiative to improve their image and their hard work is paying off. The improving ratings of these two brands has helped shift consumers eyes off of the popular German brands and redirect them to American automakers.
Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303341904575576454238670026.html?KEYWORDS=auto+industry
I think Ford and GM are slowly but surely making a comeback in the auto industry. If they don’t do well selling their cars in their own country, it would be difficult to succeed abroad. I was surprised that only the Toyota Prius took an image hit from the accelerator incident. I thought the massive recalls would hurt the images of its other brands as well. I was also surprised that the European models ranked so poorly. Because these models are often not in the news as much as American and Asian models, I assumed they were just average. It would be interesting to see where these companies stand in the future, especially once all new cars have to achieve high fuel efficiency.
ReplyDelete