I'm familiar with badge engineering thanks to that Wikipedia article you linked. By the way, thank you for your kind words about my new profile pic.
What about a Mercury Mountaineer? Explorer with Mercury badges. Again doesn't line up with the target market of younger people.
In all honesty it seems like Ford didn't know what to do with Mercury at all for most of its existence. It, from what I can tell, was meant to be a "budget luxury" brand, for young upper-middle-class people who could afford something fancier than a Ford but not as expensive as a Lincoln. Not a bad idea in theory, but they made a crucial mistake: They didn't differentiate enough between a Ford and Lincoln model. All you were really doing was paying more money for a Ford with the options you'd pay extra for equipped as standard. Chrysler and GM made this exact same mistake: On Chrysler's side, Dodge and Plymouth were selling the exact same cars from the early 70s (starting with the Challenger and Barracuda) all the way through through the 90s (ending with the Caravan and Voyager). The Aries and Reliant came with the same features, were sold for the same money, and had the exact same Pentastar badge. On GM's side, Oldsmobile didn't fit between Chevrolet and Buick, Pontiac had too much "budget" (eating into the Chevrolet brand) and not enough "sporty," Hummer was an extremely poorly-executed version of Jeep that offered huge inefficient SUVs right as the world was starting to care about the environment, and dare I say it, Saab was just GM seeing Ford buying Aston Martin and Jaguar and saying "I want a European brand too." (I'm still mad about how they took a great company with inventive cars, and ran them into the ground by throwing the Epsilon platform on them and then complaining when Saab spent money on improving it.) Today, they've mostly realized what they did wrong. Chrysler killed Plymouth in 2001 and Ford killed off Mercury in 2011. GM got rid of Oldsmobile in 2003, and then upon going bankrupt in 2009, sold the Hummer name back to AM General and dropped Saturn completely. But I'm still bitter about Saab. Saab, after talks with Koenigsegg fell through, went to Spyker, a small company who couldn't financially support a much larger operation. Spyker almost managed to get funding from a Chinese company, but it fell through. That caused the brand to be sold off to an American hedge fund, which in turn sold it to the Chinese-Swedish (but mostly Chinese) company NEVS, who went bankrupt after two years, causing the real Saab (the airplane company that sold their car division to GM) to take away NEVS' rights to the Saab name. NEVS has managed to restructure, and is now making an electric version of the 9-3 (now an 18-year-old car) in China only, with a giant ugly hood and a badge that doesn't read "SAAB." Thanks to GM's mismanagement and its inability to find a suitable buyer, all that's left of Saab Automobile is a spun-off parts company and a re-rebadged Chevy Malibu (or Opel Vectra if you're European) with a Chinese electric powertrain. Sorry, this started as a commentary on American badge engineering and ended as a Saab fanboy rant.
Ford and GM's problem wasn't having too many brands, it was having a shrinking market share and production numbers while having a constant number of brands. It makes sense to have Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, Cadillac and GMC when you have nearly half of a market of 10 million cars. It doesn't make sense to have even more brands while having less than a quarter of a sub-8-million car market. As for Chrysler, IIRC they had a much bigger market share than 10% in the 1920s and 1930s, when most of their expansion (Plymouth, DeSoto, Dodge and the Imperial line) happened.
hey, gotta ask something. There's a road I need to use frequently whose notable feature is two steep hills, and the low point of the road between them is always flooded after it's been raining. Most of the time this is okay, but now and again it's quite deep. You're going 60 and it's generally been okay for me in other cars to hit the water at that speed. Aside from in my current one. I hit it, I get a flashing engine warning light, the engine shudders and I can't get her above 40mph. The car will stay in that mode for about a minute but I'm curious what's going on there. Best guess is that it's throwing water into my air filter. Takes about 20 minutes for the effects of that puddle to go away since the engine likes to shudder if I plant my foot down for another hill. She's fine after. Probably not good for it, but I'm wondering if it's worth modifying the car to prevent that. Car's a 2006 Hyundai Atoz if anyone's interested.
I'd guess that water is getting into something electrical and screwing with it, causing a misfire until the water drains or dries out or whatever. A flashing CEL means the ECU detects a misfire bad enough to damage the catalytic converters. Without getting the codes read it's just guess work. You could do a visual inspection, I'd start by inspecting the ignition components for signs of water intrusion into connectors, coils, spark plug wells, etc. You could also check the air filter and see if its wet, because it is possible that water is getting sucked in there, but I think it would display different symptoms, such as a hole in the engine block.
6" lift, offroad tires, snorkel. Traditionally, airboxes have the intake on the bottom for some reason. You could make a custom one that intakes air from near the cabin air intake is.
I'm 19, I live alone, have no girlfriend, and I drive this van and I love it. I would say they were successful.
Do you mean the Mountaineer in the post you quoted or the Monterey minivan? Maybe from a customer satisfaction standpoint, but the problem is they weren't able to captivate enough customers because the product wasn't designed for their target market.
The other day I was in a Nissan Versa and I was preparing to make a left turn across a 2 lane+center turn lane road where the passing traffic had the right of way. I was at a stop sign. I looked left, then looked right, saw a gap in traffic then floored it trying to make the gap. Checked left again as I was pulling out into the street and saw a Silverado that I previously didn't see because it was obscured behind another car. I slammed on the brakes and skidded to a stop halfway into his lane. He was doing at least 50mph and swerved into the center turn lane to avoid me. We both had only a moment to see each other and react. Had I not seen him and hit the brakes he would have smashed into the driver's side of the Versa at speed. Had I hit the brakes but he not reacted he would have taken off the front end of the Versa. All it takes is a second of inattention or a single lapse of your awareness to fucking die, just like that. Luckily we were both paying enough attention to avoid the accident.
I went to an auto show today. Unfortunately, of the cars there, 80% were SUVs, 97% of which I did not care about whatsoever. (Did you guys hear they're reviving the Trailblazer nameplate? No? Well that's probably because no news outlet has written an article on it.) There were a few interesting cars, llike the Z4 Supra and the C8 Corvette, and a few regular cars I surprisingly liked, like the Honda HR-V and the new Corolla hybrid, but it was hard to navigate to them because they were obscured by the gigantic SUVs. In addition, I found Shotgun Chuck's worst nightmare:
Yeah. And that's odd, because I have seen articles online. I've known about the Trailblazer's return for some time now.
Can you honestly blame me for not knowing about it? They did the exact same thing they did with the Blazer nameplate, which was revive it only to slap it on a boring, generic crossover SUV. The difference is, unlike the Blazer, no one cares about the TrailBlazer name, so fewer outlets are covering it.
Not really. It's not like the Trailblazer is as big as let's say the Bronco and the C8 Corvette. Honestly, the SUVs themselves don't look all that bad to me, I just think the names aren't all that fitting. Basically a similar to story to how I feel about the Eclipse Cross, it's probably a nice vehicle, but the choice of name just doesn't fit. I still do believe Chevrolet missed two opportunities to come up with a rival to the Ford Bronco and the Jeep Wrangler with the Blazer and Trailblazer. They could've called the new Blazer something else and save the Blazer name for a K5 successor meant to compete with the Wrangler and Bronco. If not the Blazer, then definitely the Trailblazer. It probably could've gone either way.
I kinda like the edgy, small 4x4 crossovers like the Trax in all honesty. It'd be cool if they made a 4x4, basic offroad tires, lift, diff locks etc offroad model of said Trax.
Chevrolet missed a huge opportunity with the new Blazer. It could've been a really cool Wrangler/Bronco competitor if they made it truck-based like the K5 was, instead of slapping the name onto a boring crossover. They could've even called the Blazer crossover something else, and since they're reviving the Trailblazer name, it would fit their Blazer crossover perfectly IMO.
