i'm sure there are a bunch of clueless urbanites who grab their CR and head for the toyota dealer and they are much more than happy to pay 50 bucks for the dealer oil changes and like 1000 bucks for a 30,000 mile service. then there were those morons who didn't change the oil in their camrys and stuff and they got sludge.
and all the honda transmissions that went bad.........
buying toyotas and hondas is how the 'educated' class of people, the pottery barn and crate and barrel set, mainstain their visual 'superiority' over those who have to spend their money on more important things. it defies logic to them to spend less and keep some money in their pocket because they work in jobs that make lots of money. A lot of those industries and stuff are self created. Things like 'consultants', etc......the other group that buys hondas are the youngsters who may have liked civics and honda motorcycles and stuff. GM for example just does not sell to the crate and barrel set nor the 'import performance' crowd. but the MYTh has become so large now , that groups who never bought toyotas before are starting to buy them.
Example, an 80+ yo retired farmer in my dad's condo....he has like a 12 yo S-10 with about 200k miles on it, its his tooling truck. He wanted something new. He drank the Kool aid and bought a tacoma. He likes the new Toyota but never drives it. He keeps driving the S-10. He bought the Toyota because of the media and personal influences from outside. He was a happy lifetime GM owner.
You can see it in the numbers. toyota goes up 6% one month when Ford is down.
Now I don't know if he got a good deal ont he Tacoma, but I bet it was several thousand more than the Chevy.
Yet he still drives his chevy that's over a decade old with 200,000 miles and its still going.
It's those people GM and Ford cannot afford to lose unless they conquest sales themselves and they still can't do it even with good cars like the Cobalt.
Hell, why is it Mazda can oly sell 70,000 3's YTD and the lousy ugly Civic sells like 3-4 times that? The Mazda3 is so much more appealing all around. It just goes to show how the buyers can be a big joke sometimes.