By now only the willfully ignorant do not know that UAW members make $73 an hour, or rather the labor costs at Ford, GM, and Chrysler come out to roughly that figure, thanks to lavish benefits for retirees on top of an approximate $50 an hour wage for actual workers, comparable to non-union auto workers’ wages but twice the national average for all workers. And you probably know that the Big Three are burdened with thousands of dealerships that they don’t need but can’t get rid of, thanks to dealer-friendly state laws. And you also know that each of the Big Three has too many brands (Chevy, Pontiac, Buick, and Cadillac at GM, plus Hummer and God knows what else), so that they are spending massive amounts of cash competing against themselves.
But what about the actual cars the Big Three make? What are they like? Well, please don’t tell me about the ’85 Cutlass that ran like a dream or the ’97 Cherokee that blew out its transmission on the way home from the dealer. Let’s let Consumer Reports do our thinking for us, in its “Consumer Reports Cars: Best and Worst for ‘09” issue, now on the stands.
According to CR, Chrysler is dead meat. Almost two thirds of its cars rate below average. GM is scarcely better: about half are average, but about a quarter are well below average. Ford, in contrast, seems almost Japanese, or at least Korean: almost all of its cars are average or better. (CR’s ranking is unweighted: the Honda Accord (4 cylinder) counts as one car, and so does the Mercedes SLK, even though the Accord’s sales surely outnumber the SLK’s by about a hundred to one .)
It’s particularly entertaining to note that almost all of the worst cars are the expensive ones: BMW, Mercedes, Cadillac, and Chrysler* routinely turn out one stinker after another. Worst of all are the Land Rovers—all of the models are so far under water they should come with periscopes and snorkels. In fact, the Rovers are so bad they really shouldn’t be considered cars, but rather works of art, like stuffed sharks. After all, you don’t own a Land Rover because you want to go somewhere, but to show how much money you can waste on an object that has no purpose and is quite likely to decay in a few years.**
Afterwords
The cream of the jest for the Land Rover is that it derives its peculiar cachet according to the legend that it is the vehicle that can go anywhere, that can endure the most merciless conditions, when in fact you’re taking your life, or at least your bank account, into your hands whenever you back out of your own driveway.
*The Chrysler Sebring Convertible is the dog of dogs, 283% more likely to prove defective than the average car.
**Land Rovers should, in fact, come pickled in formaldehyde like sharks. They’d last longer.
