Opinion The automobile melting pot
Cars had national characteristics German precision,Italian flair. But not any more
National automotive reputations can be a boon or a bane for car companies. GM is still losing sales because of the sins of the 1970s and 80s,while Japanese cars enjoy an aura of reliability thats not always in sync with the modern products. Toyota caught a lot of bad publicity over last years mysterious throttle recalls,but mistakes like that are still viewed as anomalies.
Nearly every countrys cars are freighted with reputations forged in decades past. According to conventional wisdom,German cars are overengineered and dour. American cars are loud,fast and shoddy. British cars are charming but have problematic electrical systems. Try to get through a review of an Italian car,any Italian car,without finding some expression of the theme passionate yet temperamental. And yet,there are so many exceptions to these rules that you wonder why they persist at all a 2003 Mercedes-Benz E55 AMG,for example,is a charismatic supercharged rocketship with horrendous reliability ratings,the kind of car you might associate with America,or Italy,or possibly the Mad Max films. But certainly not the Germany of the collective imagination,a place where men in white lab coats meticulously monitor quality and ensure that no colours more spirited than charcoal find their way into the interior.
Stereotypes came from somewhere the 1991-1998 Mercedes-Benz S-Class was as humourless a dreadnought as youll find. And I know a fellow who owned the 1973 Alfa Romeo Spider,and he claims that the floorboards would get hot enough to literally melt the soles from your shoes. Meanwhile,it featured an AC that his mechanic described as like a beautiful woman gently blowing over a bowl of ice cubes. Probably not the type of diagnostic poetry that youd get from,say,a Lexus mechanic.
But that doesnt mean that a given stereotype is permanent. Modern Ferraris,for instance,are generally considered quite reliable,and the cars technical ambition rivals anything to come out of Stuttgart or Munich. The basic Fiat 500 now on sale in the US carries a four year,50,000-mile bumper-to-bumper warranty the same coverage that you get with a new BMW. Fiat,incidentally,now owns Chrysler. Volvo is owned by the Chinese. Rolls-Royce and Bentley are controlled by the Germans. Aston Martin a British company owned by the Kuwaitis has talked to Mercedes about collaborating on new models. I have to wonder if our cars will ever again exhibit any semblance of coherent national identities. Until March,the American-market Buick Regal was built in Germany,while a German-market BMW X6 is built in America.
Range Rover is perhaps the most extreme case. During the lifespan of just the current model,the company has belonged to BMW,Ford and Tata. Buy a new Range Rover,and youve got a car that was developed by Germans,updated by Americans and built by the British for an Indian corporation. If that lineage is too convoluted,perhaps youd prefer a quintessentially American SUV like the Jeep Grand Cherokee,as American as they come. Except for the suspension design,which hails from Mercedes- Benz. And the diesel engine. Thats Italian VM Motori. But if you ignore the German suspension and the Italian engine,the Jeep is Captain America. Except for the Fiat connection. Because Fiat owns Jeep now,too. And so the Grand Cherokee,a model that was once as American as Budweiser,is now as American as … well,Budweiser,which is owned by the Belgians.
The truth is that there are now very few vehicles that exemplify a particular nations approach to car-building. The consistent national quirks that spawned the old stereotypes are giving way to a global stew of cultural influences.
Fortunately,that doesnt mean that all new cars have been polished to a level of stultifying heterogeneity. The other day,I climbed into a Jaguar XF and tried to open the glove compartment,controlled by a touch sensor. Nothing happened. I touched it again. On the third try,the electrons awakened. I smiled at the 33 per cent success rate. Not bad for British electronics. Ezra Dyer
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