Last week I went on 5 day trip and I rented a car. It was a Chrysler Sebring sedan, brand new. What a POS!!! Unbelievable. It was sluggish in acceleration, extremely fuel inefficient, and twice simply died when I had to brake sharply. However, bad as performance was, that's not what shocked me. What absolutely shocked me, was the design. It's as if Chrysler got a team of designers together with the task of "make as user-unfriendly a design and as inefficient use of space as possible".
The car is extremely bulky from the outside. All that bulk however, translates into a really tiny space inside. It's ASTOUNDING. The trunk space actually holds less luggage than the Hyundai Elantra 2007 I rented a few months ago (and I had the identical luggage) - and the Elantra is a much smaller car. Cabin space, especially back seat is again much smaller than in the Elantra. Ditto for glove compartment space and other stow-away areas. I am not even bothering to compare it to other cars of similar size, like the Toyota Camry or Honda Accord. I'm intentionally focusing on the Elantra, because let's face it, the Hyundai is a downmarket brand. Yet it is VASTLY superior to the Sebring.
When you examine the reason for such inefficent use of space, you see that the apparent method by which they get there is simply INSANE. What the Chrysler folks do, is to pad the various spaces with empty plastic just to TAKE UP space and leave less free space for use. Example: the glove compartment. When it is closed, from the outside, it looks like it should be huge. But when you open it, you realize that the external lid is about 2/3 bigger than the inside space which is actually quite tiny (I couldn't fit in a book!). This tactic is employed throughout. The inside door is THICK, but the holding spaces are tiny. INSANITY. It's like those bottles unscrupulous food merchants use, where the bottom of the bottle bulges to the inside so far that it takes 1/3 of the space, so from the outside it looks like you are buying a big bottle of whatever, but when you actually pour it out, you realize it would fit into a tiny bottle.
Then the ergonomics of it - as if they spent not 5 minutes thinking about the user. The steering wheel obscures the speedometer and most of the displays (I'm of normal size, 5' 10"). Bad placement of handles, and no ceiling handle/strap for the passenger side. Rest of holding spaces awkward to get to, and tiny. By contrast, you can really feel how the Hyundai engineers "lived" in the car, you can sense the huge amount of thought that went into the design of all the elements, so the user would intuitively reach whatever he/she needed. And again - this is the downmarket Hyundai Elantra, not a Toyota or Honda.
I'm not even going to mention the hideously ugly look to everything inside, since tastes differ, but I will note the use of inferior quality materials with the resultant cheap feel. The armrest holding box lid wouldn't open consistently, the cheap plastic regularly getting jammed. NEVER had any such problems with the Elantra. The fit and finish difference between the Elantra and the Sebring was like heaven and earth. Again, the Camry and Accura are several classes above the Elantra, so there's no sense in comparing them to the Sebring.
I came back shaking my head. It is crystal clear to me, that the American car industry is absolutely DOOMED. And I'm not sorry one bit - they deserve it. Here we are in the year 2008 in a highly competitive world market and industry, and the chuckleheads at Chrysler decide: yeah, THIS is the product we'll throw against the competition... UNFREAKIN' BELIEVABLE! What are they thinking?
I only feel sorry for the workers and the engineering talent. I am convinced that we have the world's best engineering talent. And some of the most efficient workers. But we also have the WORST management on the planet, with CEOs who are reaping unbelievable hundreds of millions while they drive their companies into the ground. Simple question: why do the American executives who do such a disastrous job, earn MULTIPLE times more than the Japanese execs who dominate the industry? What's wrong with this picture?
The car is extremely bulky from the outside. All that bulk however, translates into a really tiny space inside. It's ASTOUNDING. The trunk space actually holds less luggage than the Hyundai Elantra 2007 I rented a few months ago (and I had the identical luggage) - and the Elantra is a much smaller car. Cabin space, especially back seat is again much smaller than in the Elantra. Ditto for glove compartment space and other stow-away areas. I am not even bothering to compare it to other cars of similar size, like the Toyota Camry or Honda Accord. I'm intentionally focusing on the Elantra, because let's face it, the Hyundai is a downmarket brand. Yet it is VASTLY superior to the Sebring.
When you examine the reason for such inefficent use of space, you see that the apparent method by which they get there is simply INSANE. What the Chrysler folks do, is to pad the various spaces with empty plastic just to TAKE UP space and leave less free space for use. Example: the glove compartment. When it is closed, from the outside, it looks like it should be huge. But when you open it, you realize that the external lid is about 2/3 bigger than the inside space which is actually quite tiny (I couldn't fit in a book!). This tactic is employed throughout. The inside door is THICK, but the holding spaces are tiny. INSANITY. It's like those bottles unscrupulous food merchants use, where the bottom of the bottle bulges to the inside so far that it takes 1/3 of the space, so from the outside it looks like you are buying a big bottle of whatever, but when you actually pour it out, you realize it would fit into a tiny bottle.
Then the ergonomics of it - as if they spent not 5 minutes thinking about the user. The steering wheel obscures the speedometer and most of the displays (I'm of normal size, 5' 10"). Bad placement of handles, and no ceiling handle/strap for the passenger side. Rest of holding spaces awkward to get to, and tiny. By contrast, you can really feel how the Hyundai engineers "lived" in the car, you can sense the huge amount of thought that went into the design of all the elements, so the user would intuitively reach whatever he/she needed. And again - this is the downmarket Hyundai Elantra, not a Toyota or Honda.
I'm not even going to mention the hideously ugly look to everything inside, since tastes differ, but I will note the use of inferior quality materials with the resultant cheap feel. The armrest holding box lid wouldn't open consistently, the cheap plastic regularly getting jammed. NEVER had any such problems with the Elantra. The fit and finish difference between the Elantra and the Sebring was like heaven and earth. Again, the Camry and Accura are several classes above the Elantra, so there's no sense in comparing them to the Sebring.
I came back shaking my head. It is crystal clear to me, that the American car industry is absolutely DOOMED. And I'm not sorry one bit - they deserve it. Here we are in the year 2008 in a highly competitive world market and industry, and the chuckleheads at Chrysler decide: yeah, THIS is the product we'll throw against the competition... UNFREAKIN' BELIEVABLE! What are they thinking?
I only feel sorry for the workers and the engineering talent. I am convinced that we have the world's best engineering talent. And some of the most efficient workers. But we also have the WORST management on the planet, with CEOs who are reaping unbelievable hundreds of millions while they drive their companies into the ground. Simple question: why do the American executives who do such a disastrous job, earn MULTIPLE times more than the Japanese execs who dominate the industry? What's wrong with this picture?
It started off as an automatic transmission, which I pulled out and threw in a 4 speed Toploader. :thumbsup:
