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Originally Posted by Steffo
That's the biggest bunch of.........
Try a VW Polo 1.4 ($16,990) on, sit in it, feel the interior and then tell me about corner and cost cutting. I guarantee it will put any Toyota, Honda, Nissan etc to complete shame. We owned one from 2001 - 06 before it went for a Golf 2.0 FSI, and anyone who sat in it commented on it being better then <insert more expensive Japanese car here>. It used less then 5L/100km, so it would beat a Prius in the fuel economy stakes (a guy from my old school has one and can't get under 6.2L/100km with it, combined average). A Prius is $38,990, the Polo was 26 on-road. It was problem free the whole time, and would easily continue being problem free. And resale value... after 5 years and 70,000km it traded for $12,000 at the dealership for the brand new Golf. I'd love to see an Echo/Yaris, Jazz, Mazda 2, even Fiesta manage that.
Oh the quality difference isn't negligeble, it's immense. In the German's favour.
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I was talking about Fords marketing and Fords compared to a Toyota - at no point did I mention the Polo. You paid 26k in 2001 money to put a Volkswagen Polo on the road, no doubt with the bigger engine and all the fruit - if I paid 26k for a car that size it better be bloody well built as well! There were no Jap cars that size more expensive than the Polo at the time.
Can't compare a 26k 2001 polo with an 16990 2006 polo either. Your one was built in Germany, the new South African sourced Polos/Golfs...they might use nice materials but believe me they don't make 'em like they used to anymore. I had one mate who had an A3 and moved to the latest diesel 110kW Golf - not impressed with the interior/general quality. Another mate who doesn't wanna upgrade from the previous Golf to the latest one cos the previous German made Golfs had better interiors. But the South African argument is for another time - u better hope they don't start sourcing their Polo hatches from China soon.
As for resale values - here's some real facts:
2001 5 door 5 sp manual cars with the smallest donk you can get.
Polo:
http://www.redbookasiapacific.com/au...p?key=VOLK01AV
Echo:
http://www.redbookasiapacific.com/au...p?key=TOYO01CS
Echo wins on a percentage basis. Fiesta has only been out since 04 so I'll have to wait until 09 to do the 5 year thing with a Fiesta.
If you drive a Prius and any other Fiesta/Polo/Yaris/Jazz/Swift on the highway, the non-hybrids will beat the Prius in fuel economy - this is a known fact. Prius weighs 300kg more and the petrol 1.5litre has to remain running on the highway. Actually, I never saw the point of buying a 30k+ hybrid in the first place as the hybrid uses the same amount of petrol as a 17k econobox. If you need to drive, the kindest thing you can do for the environment and your wallet is to buy a 17k econobox cos it takes less resources to build than a hybrid and will have a longer operating life than a hybrid. Hybrids are useful only if they're big like the GS450H or whatever it is - giving you heaps of big luxury car performance at 11l/100km.
My previous post got me thinking though - Holden has buggered up as well - they were onto a good thing when they were doing the whole segregated 'Local importer of Opel || Commodore Factory' image before they flushed it all down the toilet in favour of badge engineering daewoos. Ford should be pushing harder with that - trying to split its Ford of Europe products from everything else. They weren't helped when ACA did a 'lemon car' article and one of the cars was a Focus LX :(