Saturday, December 1, 2012

What Cars Do You Love That Automotive Journalists Hate?

What Cars Do You Love That Automotive Journalists Hate?Today we showed you the refreshed Honda Civic, an updated version of the fantastically boring Civic that is currently still selling quite well. It seems that there are plenty of people who like the Civic, even though many car writers loathe it.

55_mercury tried to explain why the car gets a good reception from buyers, but not reviewers.

I think the reason why there's such a "mystery" amongst some auto journalists as to why cars like the Civics sells as well as they do is because 95% of those who drive such cars are looking for one thing and one thing only: reliable, no-nonsense commuting.

Much seems to be made about "oh how borrrring" cars like these are. But in reality, take a look at just what the Civic has looked like... forever. My Wife had a 1990 Civic until 5 years ago. The car was about as plain as they come: there wasn't anything remotely remarkable about the car. It was also slow as hell. But what was remarkable was that it NEVER had problems. That's precisely why they sell. Truth be told, cars like these have been "boring" forever. Claiming an 80's or 90's Civic is anymore exciting that today's variant is only kidding yourself.

Truth be known, most people don't give a flying %#!@ about hand stitched leather, minimal gap tolerances in the dash, handling, or "switch feel". These are qualities that are generally present in luxury cars. People who buy luxury actually do care about those things, but they also view "quality" in a whole different light. I say this because an awful lot of those luxury cars are total pieces of crap. Over-engineered and thus failure-prone rolling junk tied up in a pretty and admittedly desirable package. In many cases "Luxury" doesn't automatically mean long-term reliability. But no matter, people who want those cars buy them anyway no matter how often they break down or have yet another annoying electrical gremlin.

Given a choice, most people ? and when I say most ? I mean average Joes like me who aren't about to shell out 50-60k for a car- are going to choose a no-nonsense, boring, but reliable car for getting back and forth to work. It's interesting that the cars that are derided and criticized the most by the automotive press are ALSO the best-selling cars in the country. If you're a company who makes cars then logically it would make sense to continue to make products that people want to buy because that makes more money (duh). Whether they're boring or not doesn't really matter so long as whatever secret sauce that's put into the product makes them sell well.

This makes us wonder, what other cars have been loved by car buyers, even though car journalists have panned it? Which of those cars did you actually like?

Photo Credit: AP Images

Source: http://jalopnik.com/5964750/what-cars-do-you-love-that-automotive-journalists-hate

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