[lemetier]

Originally Posted by c63er

This is all in response to the reports of the German cartel, which any observer with a few IQ points easily sees as being true.

Our own scott in his arrogance used to brag about how the first car from a new production line would be delivered to the bmw gates by mercedes and vice versa. The German car structure is that they won't hurt each other and possibly help each other where mutually beneficial. When it comes to competing in the global market that would make sense from a $ point of view.

The problem is that structure is not good for consumers nor is it good for the products in the long run.

You can tangibly see this now, cars from all the German brands now drive and steer very similarly. Transmissions between them are almost ubiquitously the same. With a new German car what you are paying for is a brand name, styling and whatever pride your ego assigns to those things. When one of 3 decides to go with conservative homogenized styling across the lineup all the rest do he exact same thing. An amazing co incidence for car styling which is set years in advance. Of course there is collusion.

So the German companies have high profits while we have subpar and homogenized products. I do hope this forces a change in how bussiness is done because any change in how bmw operates would be good from our perspective. As we all know it is German Toyota right now.

A truism in the world is that every action has unintended consequences, and the diesel gate is far from over it seems as they are now reaching their hands into the very corporate bowels of these companies and I for one cheer this on. We need change and if bmw feels the heat Maybee thy will put effort into making a drivers car to compete.

Don't burn up those few IQ points...

https://www.unece.org/trans/main/welcwp29.html