The withering dream of a cheap American electric car

I will never buy an American car. I remember my parents' multiple Dodges and Fords catastrophically failing before they switched to Toyota.

US car companies have created the lasting idea that cars are dead at 100K miles, because those companies' cars absolutely were. Meanwhile, I bought my Honda at 148K and it's over 210K now and doing fine.

Tesla seems to live up to the legendary Ford quality, with hilarious workmanship issues, Ford Pinto level "it'll trap you in a fire" design and frequent failures. Probably because they threw out the hard-learned lessons of a century of auto-making for novelty electronic gimmicks.

I believe it's worth pointing out that with your Toyota, you're still buying an American car. The vast majority of Toyota vehicles sold in America are made in US plants.

Which is a good thing! It shows that those other quality issues are not related to US labor force, or some intrinsic American inability to make high quality goods.

Well, the big seller is Canadian. RAV4 comes out of Woodstock, Ontario.

Designs, manufactures and sells all in the US. For all intensive purpose, the Japanese exert a rather small influence on the day to day operations

US cars have not been dead at 100k miles in decades, but people still accuse them of that. I have my Chrysler at 230k miles and still running fine.

Note that many of the "American" cars with the bad reputation are Toyota's with just a different logo. Even though it is easy to check who made the car, the American logo makes for the reputation that it will die in 100k miles.

I don’t know what you’re doing but I have had 3 American sedans (1 mustang, 1 fusion, 1 Malibu) over the past 20 years and they all (2) made it over 200k miles when I sold them with my current one approaching that, nothing but regular maintenance and one time I had to replace shocks/struts on the ford fusion. 200k is when I generally pack it up and get a new car.

intents* and purposes

We have 2 Chevrolet EVs, a Bolt EUV made in the US and an Equinox EV made in Mexico.

They're great. I have rotated the tires twice on the Bolt and I'm getting some different wipers for the windshield because my wife doesn't like the noise the factory ones make. Oh, and I got floor mats for both cars.

I have Car Play in the Bolt and GM's own system in the Equinox (Android for Autos or something like that, not the standard Android Auto) and they're both fine.

I use SuperCruise whenever I can. That's only on freeways with the Bolt and a lot more other places with the Equinox. I was backseat in an Uber Saturday and it was neat watching the Tesla Model 3's AutoPilot system. Very cool. On the other hand, GM was reporting no accidents with their cars, which include ICE vehicles, too. https://gmauthority.com/blog/2024/02/gm-super-cruise-users-t...

> US car companies have created the lasting idea that cars are dead at 100K miles

OT but, there were clear exceptions to this even back in the bad ol' days. It was common knowledge in the 70s that for certain engines (such as Chevy small blocks), if you cared for the engine (mainly: regular oil changes) you could get 200K+ out of it. The rest of the car was too low-tech to decay, except of course for road salt vs body work.