Wednesday, January 7, 2009
By the Way / Hannan Shocker: It's the Foreign Car Company that Dares to Treat Consumers Like Adults
Posted by Caleb Hannan on Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 10:55 AM
The Big Three automakers have been on the receiving end of a heavy payload of crap lately, and for good reason. While their product continues its decades-long slide towards irrelevance, they've flown their pockets-turned-out CEOs to Capitol Hill in Learjets and continued bombarding TV-watchers with ads that deftly insist trucks aren't worth a dime if they can't split the pendulum swing of two eight-ton I-beams.
Hewing close to reality, it could be observed, is not an institutional priority.
So it should come as no surprise that a foreign auto-maker has found yet another way to run circles around the Americans.
Korean-based Hyundai is now advertising an ingenious new warranty: Lose your job within a year of buying one of their cars and you can bring it back to the lot. It's called the Hyundai assurance, and while we can all be assured there is a ton of fine print that goes along with that ad pablum, it is nice, for once, to see car makers reacting to the Real World rather than creating an alternate version where everyone can still afford $40,000 SUVs and all men grunt rather than speak in complete sentences.
I know there are thousands of jobs at stake and all, but can't we just mercy kill these bastards now before they start convincing us you're not a true, G.D. American unless you run over your dinner and eat it raw?
Comments (3)
Showing 1-3 of 3
They are just cutting out the repo-middle-man?
BTW - I guess you don't shop extensively for utility vehicles? Shopping for a piss-ant Tacoma recently left me barraged with the same exhausting imagery. Muck, mud, mountains and the morons that move them. Not a scrap of douglas fir or plasterboard in sight.
http://www.toyota.com/tacoma/
like
dislike
i was listening to this story on npr; yeah i'm sure there's some fine print, but as far as i can tell this is a pretty damn smart idea. they'll maybe eat some money buying back their used cars, but they'll more than make up for it with the sales they pull in from this program. i mean, what's the incentive to scam this? nobody WANTS to loose their job if they're paying for a car, and if they do, it's not like they get to keep the car for free, they just have the opportunity to get out of the debt.
You're right broke ass, commercial appeal to the consumer's inner Cro Magnon is not limited to the American auto makers. And it IS exhausting. It somehow seems more egregious, however, when the people doing the pushing are the same ones who can't afford to pay their employees.
