All this Big Three bashing, by obvioulsy ignorant blowhards, is astounding. We have nevadagarth embarassingly yapping about "economy" (vs. "economics") classes , "tauting" (vs. "touting"), and "benefit/cost ratio" (vs. "cost-benefit analysis"), while also believing that Iacocca is hawking GM (vs. Chrysler) products. Laughably, someone actually thinks nevadagarth is so smart he's worth quoting!
Then we have shovelhd spouting idiocy by relating some inane concept ("eating your young") espoused by chimps who climb poles for the "tech business" to the recent employee discount promotions. Then he audaciously claims "That is very bad news for the US economy."
Funny, people often refer to the concept of "dime-store psychology," but it appears this forum is running amok with imbeciles who practice "dime-store economics."
Your collective contention that buying a "bad" car inexpensively means you still get a bad car is a statement of the obvious. Buying a red apple, whether for 50 cents or $50 still makes that apple red. More to the point though, every day in life, people go around doing a cost-benefit analysis on any number of purchases and other decisions. For example, should I buy a house in a great community and pay an astronomical purchase price and high property taxes, or a less expensive home in a so-so community and send the kids to private school. Another: should I drive above the speed limit on my way home from work and risk a ticket and bear a (slightly?) higher probability of death or injury so that I can get home to watch my favorite TV show, or keep to a reasonable speed and risk missing a few minutes of the show. In any number of these questions facing each of us every day, we each draw the line at different places.
So, people who want to buy a "bad" car at a low price may very consciously be taking into account the cost (time and money) of extra service needed on that "bad" car. They may be hoping or expecting that they have purchased a "reverse lemon" (a good car among cars reputed to be poor). It's also VERY possible that many people don't even view cars made by the Big Three as "bad" cars at all. God knows, there are millions of them on the road all over the globe.
BTW, many American brands do quite well in JD Powers' THREE-year survey (not just the initial quality survey that you're probably referring to).
Moreover, if you were a fan of the reliability of Japanese cars (read: Toyota, Honda, and, to a lesser extent, Nissan) some ten years ago, you should be very happy with the quality of the American brand cars you ridicule today. That is, products from GM, Ford and Chrysler today are generally as reliable as Japanese cars some 10 years ago. Fortunately for us consumers, Toyota, et al. have not rested on their laurels and have continued to perfect their products, such that they continue to beat American cars in reliability today.
That said, buying a car is as much emotion as logic for most people. It might be the case that those interested in purchasing the RL is more practically minded than the general car-buying public (great mix of practicality, comfort, expected reliability, and value), but I bet even those buying the RL are driven to do so partly or mostly do to their "love" of the vehicle. Just scan through this thread and others here and on other RL-related forums and you'll see what I mean. In fact, scan through auto forums on the net generally and you'll invariably find the good majority of posters gushing about how their vehicle is great. Back to economics, there was groundbreaker work done by Kevin Murphy (I believe) that suggests that many people, following a big-ticket purchase, become irrationally fond of that item (the exact opposite of buyer’s remorse). This can be observed in the fact that many people begin to notice a particular brand of car on the road only after they purchased that car. Similarly, many people “consume” advertising for a car even after their purchase of that vehicle (counter to the goal of advertising which is to promote interest in a product for the purpose of encouraging its purchase).
Bottom line is that attacking a whole line of cars (and, by extension, the companies that make them and the people who work for these companies) is petty and unnecessary. This thread was begun by someone simply expressing his dismay at getting a lower price for his trade-in because of, according to the dealer, the competition from the various new-car promotions out there. No need to start bashing American-branded vehicles, especially when done in an ignorant fashion.
BTW, I'm half Japanese and drive an Acura MDX and a Toyota Sienna (a nearly $40k minivan which, with only 8k miles, needed 2 new front strut assemblies that took a week for my local dealer to get from California which offered me the [dis]pleasure of driving a tiny Corolla loaner car for a few days). Thus, I'm hardly a Japan basher. I'm just being a bit more realistic about the auto sector than you are. At least, in my opinion.