Originally Posted by
big john
I worked at a multi-line dealer where we sold Daihatsu vehicles for a short time. The factory denied every warranty claim we made and the cars were more expensive than competing models from established brands. The dealer had a hard time selling them and we even made some of them rental/loaner cars.
The factory ceased operations in the U.S. but we still had to honor the warranty and service the cars that survived.
There was no parts network in the U.S. so parts had to be ordered individually from Japan. This usually took about a month and if the part was wrong or damaged, wait another month. I was happy to be free of the hassle when I quit that dealer but a few years later I was hired by another dealer which was also saddled with the brand. There were so few of the cars left by then I didn't have to deal with them very often.
Chevrolet also sold several cars manufactured by Suzuki. The biggest pain was the Geo Sprint Turbo. No service information, no parts, nobody with enough experience to ask. I refused to work on one and they customer left it there for 6 months, eventually bringing a pile of used parts which didn't fix it. They towed it out.
It's kind of a shame, Suzuki made some fun cars, but from what I gather they couldn't support their dealer network in North America with enough inventory and interested customers went elsewhere. They were kind of in a middle ground between big enough to mass produce vehicles but not big enough to gain enough traction on this continent.
I don't pay that much attention to the auto industry but I remember reading things around the time Isuzu or Saab went away to the effect that a combination of a requirement in the U.S. for higher safety requirements in vehicles than in other countries (driven mainly by the fact that the U.S. requires auto manufacturers to attempt to design cars to protect un-seatbelted people) and various tax and regulatory requirements that heavily penalize the smaller auto manufacturers meant that all smaller manufacturers' days were numbered in the U.S. The article I read predicted Volvo would be next but so far they seem to be OK.
Anyway I like having more choices so this is a bummer. Sure Honda is a good car but I don't want to drive the same thing everyone else drives.