Help wanted: Cars! (and: you can take the girl out of Michigan . . .)

Last updated on: August 21, 2016 at 5:38 pm by Jane the Actuary

Help wanted: Cars! (and: you can take the girl out of Michigan . . .) 2016-08-21T17:38:51-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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from pixabay.com; https://pixabay.com/en/car-automotive-cars-trade-dealer-718781/ ; public domain

So my youngest son turned 9 last May, which means that our two cars also had their ninth “birthday,” and we’re in the market for replacing them — or at least one of them.

Vehicle #1 is a Chevy Impala, to be replaced by a full-size sedan. Remember: the boys are 9, 13, and 16, and we intend to keep the car long enough that it’ll need to fit three teen boys/young adults.

Vehicle #2 is a Grand Caravan. I’d love to go back to driving a car, especially as the gas mileage is terrible, but I don’t see that happening for a while. Sure, we don’t need to fit a stroller in whenever we go anywhere, but we want a car that can carry bikes, camping gear, etc.

The catch: yeah, I know it’s not the same situation as in the 1980s, and the “Japs taking our jobs” issue is balanced by the fact that you have to feel a certain sympathy for the Japanese right now, with a birth rate in the toilet, and the sort of culture that, well, I sure as heck wouldn’t want to be living in. (Remember Shutting Out the Sun?), but, well, I’m still a Detroit girl. OK, make that a suburban Detroit girl. Dad was a 30-year employee of General Motors. I remember Mom and Dad sitting at the kitchen table, sometime in the 80s, worrying that the current round of job cuts would impact them. And the newspaper, full of reports of job losses and plant closing. To buy a foreign-made car was practically a traitorous act.

Now, in the meantime, non-American companies have begun to build cars in the U.S. (I’ve never been entirely clear on the extent to which it was good PR/business sense and how much it was influenced by tariffs.) But, as Dad’ll tell you, the assembly jobs may be in the U.S., but the engineering work, and the corporate profits, are elsewhere.

At the same time, well, I may be persuaded to welcome a German car into the driveway. After all, my husband is German, and it’s not as if, when they produce price-competitive cars, it’s because they underpay their workers relative to the U.S. Germany faces the same challenges of producing cars with high worker pay demands as the U.S.

So, two questions for readers:

What cars would you recommend?

And are you like me, with car-buying that one last remaining “buy American” purchase long after you’ve abandoned that effort elsewhere?

from pixabay.com; https://pixabay.com/en/car-automotive-cars-trade-dealer-718781/ ; public domain

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