Departing from the Mantra

As a bookend to yesterday's post, here is an article from Car and Driver magazine that, as far as I know, has no reason to be biased. Comparing the Chevrolet Malibu to the Toyota Camry (which is outselling the Malibu at a greater than 2 to 1 clip) in this article, they write:

"We think the Malibu is better than the Camry, but we can’t blame the public for being skeptical of the Malibu. ..it takes time to erase distrust, both among auto journalists and the public at large. And with GM losing billions, the company might just be running out of time to convince car buyers."

Comparing the Cadillac CTS to the Lexis IS, they write:

"...the CTS has a superior chassis that is both supple on-road and up to race-track abuse. The Cadillac also offers a larger and more comfortable interior for the price and more options."

I find that I'm increasingly sounding like a car salesman , and that isn't really the goal. Furthermore, I acknowledge that there are many other vehicles out there that don't meet the standards set by these four vehicles. I just continue to think it is important that people, even someone as unimportant as me, sell the idea that, in some instances, things are improving. This improvement isn't the kind of improvement that we used to find acceptable - this being that things were so terrible, even slight enhancements above this level of suck were massive wins. These are improvements that put us on par or ahead of world-class standards.

For far too long on far too many issues, Michigan in general was satisfied with improvement but not competitiveness. Before, we were satisfied to eat a half-sucked sucker off the street, then, we were happy to eat the treat only once we had pulled the visible hairs off the sucker. Now, we will only consider it if it is still in its original wrapper. That analogy is a piece of crap, but maybe you get my point.