USA taste and import restrictions

["Rick Sharpless" <fsharple@domain.elided>]

    I'm not so sure that either the notion that "Alfa's are gone because the
import restrictions lessen competition and choice and make it too much of a
hassle" argument or the "Alfa would be successful if only the public knew of
it" arguments really stand up to examination.  Much as I have enjoyed my
Alfas, they were never well-tailored to the North American market, nor were
the efforts to sell them ever well supported.  Alfa is, unfortunately, a car
that could not cut it with consumers in what is the most competitive
automotive market in the world.

    Only in North America do Japanese, European and US manufacturers compete
head-to-head.  The competition (not import restrictions) in North America
has driven out several European manufacturers (Peugeot, Renault, the old
British Leyland marques, Fiat, Alfa, Citroen, Opel) and helped bankrupt
Nissan, Mazda, and Hyundai.  Chrysler was rescued almost 20 years ago, and
GM itself narrowly escaped bankruptcy in the 1980's; the sale of the
"E-shares" was to raise money just to pay bills and keep the doors open.
>From a business standpoint, it doesn't get any tougher than North America.
Although a company's engineering (for the driver) may be first-class, if it
can't make a car responsive to consumer wants and deliver it a competitive
price, while making enough money to stay around through the next down-cycle,
it isn't going to be here long-term. Whether you like their product or not,
Ford, D-C, maybe Toyota and Honda, and currently GM do this.  Others often
don't.

    Alfa's product (which I own, enjoy, admire, and whose departure I
personally regret) does not and did not cut it in the North American
marketplace, with the possible exception of the Giulia's in the late 60's
and early 70's and the Spider on through the 80's.  The stepper motor issue
in the 164 is one example of why.  From my days as a dealer wrench, it would
have been well-within GM's screwing-up abilities to have done something that
dumb themselves.  But if they had, it would have been engineered out of the
car as soon as the warranty claims started coming in, and GM would have
fixed it no-charge regardless of time or mileage (I personally rebuilt X-car
manual transmissions, a true piece of GM junk, at 90 and 100 thousand miles
on warranty, no argument by owner needed).  The mistake would not have been
repeated, year after year.  Now, few, if any currently successful
manufacturers would even commit so bone-headed a mistake.  Most of the other
problems on my 164 (the anemic A/C system with its piece-of-junk Sanden
compressor, random electrical glitches, the fault-intolerant cooling system)
simply aren't considered acceptable by most consumers in the 1990's, and
rightly so.  For $35,000, most people expect to buy it, change the oil now
and again, and do nothing else for 50-100,000 miles.  They do not expect
idiot lights weekly, high temps on the cooling gauge in traffic,
weak-to-inoperative A/C, and most importantly, they DO NOT expect to be on a
first-name basis with their service manager.  Most of us on this digest are
willing to overlook such issues, but most US/Canadian consumers, generally,
are not.

    Import restrictions are a hassle once the quantities drop down to low
numbers, but remember that it was the US distributors of European cars (not
any manufacturer, domestic or foreign) who pushed the changes some years ago
to require foreign cars to be brought in only by "importers" (absent a full
US certification label from the mfgr).  The distributor/dealers had had
enough of "gray market" Benz's and BMW's depriving them of sales.  And
honestly, as long as some reasonable number of cars can be sold, it's not a
big problem

    As to the comment that GM and Ford can't make a driver's car, I beg to
differ.  Although not my taste, at all, it is hard to argue with the
price-performance of a Camaro Z-28 or Corvette these days, and either will,
I must regretfully concede, whip my 164 (and a lot of cars costing 2 and 3
times as much) on most any road course, dragstrip, or just about anything
else.  They win on the skidpad, on the straight, and through the slalom, and
it isn't even close.  Ford offers the Contour SVT (and the almost-a Z28
mustang) at popular prices.  Care to put a Contour SVT head-to-head with a
3-series Beemer?  And as to the lowered and decorated rice-burners now
enjoyed by today's youth, these poor children have no clue what it's like to
have 425 factory horsepower in 3500-4000 pounds (achieved by GM, Chrysler
and Ford over 30 years ago, at "family sedan" prices of the day).  They
think a 210 hp V-6 in 3200 pounds is a kick.  And their rice-burners
understeer almost as stubbornly as a 67 GTO, without the RWD horsepower to
help float the back end around.  They may not be your cup of tea, but just
as an Alfa so well expresses Italian ideas of automotive design, the muscle
car unequivocally and unabashedly expressed an ideal of design, too.  I'm
not sure what, if anything, is expressed through the design of any Accord.
Cheap and easy to manufacture, maybe?

So while I regret Alfa's departure, and long for their return, it was
business and competition, combined with Alfa's own deficiencies, not
ignorance or import restrictions that sent them away.  And you may not like
DC, Ford or GM, but if you look at their annual reports and compare them
with just about any other manufacturer, they must be doing something right,
because they are making a ton of money making cars.  What did they do that
Alfa/Citroen/Fiat/MG/Austin/Rover/Nissan/Mazda/Peugeot did not?

Rick Sharpless
Greensboro  NC

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End of alfa-digest V7 #1370
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