Archive for July, 2009

Ford has now announced the prices of the 2010 Fords and Lincolns equipped with its 355 to 365 horsepower “EcoBoost” 3.5-liter turbocharged V6. At one point Ford said EcoBoost would add $750 to the cost of an engine. But perhaps they were comparing the EcoBoost engine to the one it took the place of, a V8 in this case.

As it happens, EcoBoost adds $3,000 to the price of a Flex AWD and MKT AWD, and $5,000 to a Lincoln MKS AWD. In all three cases, about $200 can be attributed to the manually-shiftable automatic with shift paddles. With the MKS, the Ecoboost’s price bump also includes larger wheels that cost $510 on the non-turbo MKS.

Still, EcoBoost clearly costs more with the MKS. Why?

In comparison, the price bump on the Flex and MKT seems reasonable. But there’s one big problem: I recently drove a regular Flex for 2,500 miles, and the regular 262-horsepower V6 felt more than adequate. This just isn’t the sort of vehicle that tends to be driven aggressively. If I was driving in the mountains or towing a trailer, then the EcoBoost would probably be much more necessary.

Car price comparisons

People have been asking for an easier way to get to the previous responses and surveys for all their cars. It has been possible to get to a list of your cars by going to any survey, but there hasn’t been one centralized car list.

Well, now there is one. Just click on “My Garage” in the navigation bar, log in (if you haven’t already), and you’re there.

With this page, you can get from any page of the site to a specific survey form in just two or three clicks.

It’s also possible to update your cars’ status from this page.

I used to update the list of most popular car price comparisons every month or two. But they rarely changed much, so…well, it’s been nearly a year.

And still there haven’t been many changes. The former #1 and #2, Accord-Camry and Odyssey-Sienna, have been displaced all the way to #2 and #3. The new #1: Honda CR-V vs. Toyota RAV4, up from #4. Aside from that shift, the top five remain the same. As before, every one of them is Honda vs. Toyota.

Honda continues to dominate the list. Twenty-four of the top forty comparisons include at least one Acura or Honda model.

The highest ranked comparison that’s not all Japanese? #8: Audi A4 vs. BMW 3-Series. The BMW benchmark appears three other times in the list.

When this list was first compiled there wasn’t a single American car in it. There still aren’t many: domestic cars appear in only seven comparisons. Highest ranked is Tahoe /Suburban vs. Yukon, at #23. These aren’t fashionable vehicles lately. Perhaps one site visitor performed a larger number of comparisons between them.

Two rungs further down: Chevrolet Malibu vs. Ford Fusion. Neither car was on the list last time. This time around, the Fusion appears four times on the list (the Malibu just this once). The midsize Ford appears to be a rising favorite among the sort of car buyers who usually shop the Accord and Camry.

No Chrysler model is on the list.

One final surprise: despite relying heavily on price for sales, a Hyundai only appears on the list once, the Santa Fe at #29. The previous list also included the Accent, Elantra, and Sonata, but they aren’t being researched as often in recent months.

A key attraction of the Subaru Legacy has been the GT trim, which offered a turbo four, manual transmission, and all-wheel-drive in a moderately priced almost midsize sedan. A flat six was also offered in recent years, but Subaru’s emphasis was on the turbo four.

I’ve added pricing for the 2010 Legacy to TrueDelta’s database, and price comparisons with the 2009 yield some interesting results.

Comparing the 2009 and 2010 Legacy GTs, the latter has a lower base price, but you have to add the Limited Package and a sunroof to make them truly comparable. Once you do that, the 2010 lists for over $2,000 more. Adjusting for feature differences narrows the gap by only about $200. Not promising.

On the other hand, the price difference is only about $800 after adjusting for feature differences with the 3.0 R vs. 3.6 R. They’re clearly pushing harder with the six now. It used to cost about the same as the GT. Now it’s a couple grand less–despite having a standard automatic transmission.

Notably, while the six has always only been available with an automatic, the Legacy GT is now only available with a stick. Combine this with the fact that the turbo four isn’t even offered in the 2010 Outback, and the writing is on the wall: the days of the turbo four in Subaru’s mid-sized cars are numbered. The new Legacy GT, with its higher price and unavailable automatic, won’t sell well. Then they’ll do what they’ve done with other slow-selling configurations in recent years, and kill it.

It seems Subaru now wants their midsize cars to be like everyone elses: manual and automatic with a naturally aspirated four, and automatic only with a six. Might they even start offering front-wheel-drive cars again?

I keep reading over and over, most recently in today’s Automotive News, that GM needs to tell the American public that it “is not the company that screwed them in 1978.” The claim: the cars that turned millions of people away from GM were decades ago, and that GM is unfairly being punished for the sins of long-retired executives and employees.

As much as I’d like to see GM recover, this annoys me. I tend to get annoyed when people try to make something true by repeating it over and over. They read it somewhere, so it must be true, right?

The reality: GM’s cars are much better than they were, but they often aren’t as good as they should be. Based on responses to TrueDelta’s Car Reliability Survey, the oft-mentioned 2008 Chevrolet Malibu was the exception, not the rule, among GM’s recent new product launches. The 2007 Aura, the 2007 Lambdas, the 2008 VUE, and the 2008 CTS all launched with two to three times the average repair frequency.

This said, an extra problem or two in the first year or three isn’t what scares away potential buyers. Based on the emails I receive, many people want to know how a car will hold up for years after the warranty ends. So neither IQS nor VDS is going to carry much weight with them.

In the long-term, if GM’s cars hold up then its reputation will improve. But this could take a decade or more.

In the interim, GM needs to more firmly and comprehensively stand behind its products, to remove risk from buyers’ minds. As I’ve suggested before, they could do this by stating that they’ll cover the cost of any common problem for the first 100,000 or even 120,000 miles. The “old GM” wasn’t just a matter of the number of problems the cars had. How the company treated owners with car problems was at least as significant. Currently customer assistance is provided out of warranty on a seemingly arbitrary case-by-case basis. This does nothing to instill potential buyers with confidence in the company.

GM isn’t unusual in this regard–this sort of “customer care” is the industry norm. But GM needs buyers more than other car companies do. If GM truly is a different company now, providing clearly defined, comprehensive customer care would be a good way to prove this to the car buying public. Talk alone shouldn’t be sufficiently convincing, and probably won’t be.

GM is asking car buyers to wager that its quality has improved. But is GM willing to put its (U.S. government-provided) money where its mouth is, and bet on itself?