On a serious note, I don’t like the styling of most of the current BMWs.
I think the new 7 series looks odd up front, it’s too bulbous.

My guess is you have an extremely weak grasp of economics and don’t understand the consequences of letting such huge corporations fall simultaneously.

Also, if you want to look at reliability, you should take a look at Mercedes’ recent track record. You should also take notice that multiple American cars have won awards for excellence from 07-09.

As for a survey of who is buying a car in the next 12 months, I’m buying a 2009 Merc E550 this spring and my Wife and I are planning to buy a new 2009 Merc GL class for her around December of 09. My folks just bought a Toyota Prius, my Brother bought a new Subaru. A friend of mine just bought a new Lexus GS 350 and another friend of mine just bought Honda Minivan (People Carrier).

With regards to the bailout of the big 3 in the US, I’m not sure how Ford, GM or Chrysler are building cars for those of you in the UK and Europe, but the cars built for those of us in the US are garbage. The materials are cheep, the designs are uninspiring, and as Paul has mentioned in other blogs, they seem to think that relying on a quick buck off of cheaply built cars or big obnoxious cheaply built 4×4 SUVs is the key to success. As you can imagine they’re terribly unreliable. The worst was a 1993 Ford Taurus SHO (I’m not sure you have them there) that cost me about $14,000.00 in repairs the last year I owned it. Then there was the 1996 Chrysler that cost more per year in repairs than its $42,000.00 Japanese replacement did in purchase payments. They don’t seem to have improved much in recent years either. A friend of mine who would buy nothing but American finally got sick of the problems he was facing with his GM cars and replaced both of them at the same time with Hondas last year, and he’s not the only person I know who’s done this. Many of the Americans I know hate our cars, so you can understand how astonished we are to hear that you guys like them. 

When I heard the big three were in trouble a part of me hoped they’d be allowed to die. I figured that it would make way for car companies that have been producing higher quality products all along. In the end the only reason why I’m happy about the bailout is for the Men and Women who would have otherwise been left for broke. America doesn’t really believe in helping “real” people in need and our unemployment is a joke. A part of me wants to say that I hope the US’s big 3 has learned their lessons, and will make better cars that can compete with those from Europe and Japan, but I simply know better. History has shown that we quickly forget our lessons here and allow what should be common-sense to yield to the worst of capitalism. So with that said I expect us too crash our market badly again within the next 20 years and I’m sure that either Ford, GM or Chrysler will declare some sort of financial crisis as well because of their own fault.

The new ford focus model is, in my opinion.. weak. I have just purchased a Focus 1999 reg (older, much more aesthetically agreeable).. with a few mods, it’s insane, replaced the entire exhaust system, filters etc… cleaned it up.. BRING BACK THE OLD MODEL.

i laughed and remebered top gears 40mph gwiz crash test and said if we all had g-wi,s we would lower emmisions and lower thhe population