rev up your engines, today by popular
demand I'm gonna talk about five car brands that have gotten worse over time,
and kind of contrary to Darwin's natural selection these companies are still
around, they haven't gone extinct like the dinosaurs yet, now taking the lead or if
you look at another way, the ones at the bottom of the pack is definitely
Chrysler, Chrysler might be going extinct they lost thirteen point one percent of
car sales in 2018 and they have a limited amount of cars anyway realize
this is about cars that got worse, now Chrysler has had problems for a long
time let's see they're running a verge of
bankruptcy a while back and then Mercedes bought them and called it daimler
Chrysler for a while though there's the legendary Mercedes quality buying
Chrysler known for poor quality and it didn't work out all that well it was
projected that they lost billions on that deal, mercedes-benz gave up with it and
who ended up buying it but Fiat now it's Fiat Chrysler, now there's a
merger that's certainly not made in heaven, you got two companies notorious
for low quality Chrysler and Fiat merging together with Fiat being the one
who owns the big picture and if you put modern technology into a poorly
manufactured facility that's a recipe for disaster,
I've seen these Fiat Chrysler some of them had twenty five, thirty five
thousand miles either the engines or the transmissions blew up on them, now
the original Chrysler company way back 40 50 60 years ago and so, they were
known as a quality car, they made cars that people wanted, but as time passed
on Chrysler went down the slippery slope,
they did buy jeeps, Jeep was originally willys-overland, AMC corporation bought them
out and Chrysler bought out AMC and they basically threw all the cars amc made
away and just kept the jeeps because they wanted the jeep name and in many
cases that's all it is anymore the name Jeep, take a
Jeep renegade this just a rebadged Fiat four-wheel-drive vehicle,
hey they're basically pretty clunky vehicles they don't hold up all that
well and they certainly aren't some off-road thing like a real Jeep used to
be where you could go off-road they're just junky little Fiats but they
sell them as jeeps and some people buy them they don't know the real history, do
research before you buy a vehicle, now really as far as I'm concerned Chrysler
hey they went from the frying pan into the fire, they definitely are the
absolute fastest downhill company that I can think of, now the next car company
that's gone downhill is General Motors now I learned to drive on a Chevrolet
myself back in the 60s they were solid reliable cars and GM of course makes
Cadillac, decades ago Cadillacs was a luxury brand everybody's thinking about
I want to ride around in a Cadillac well they've gone a long way from being one
of the top-rated cars to where they are today, sure I used to have customers who
were satisfied with their GM pickup trucks their GM cars decades and decades
ago all of my customers that bought General Motors products in the last 10
15 years they were all either extremely disappointed or relatively disappointed
if they kept the vehicle for any length of time, now GM does have a bright spot
but it's in China but those were made in China for the Chinese market maybe
they're gonna end up making and importing them over here, could be a
better deal I don't know but that doesn't exist yeah, maybe instead of
going down all the way they'll start coming up a little with Chinese made GM
vehicles but that's not the case yet so I'm still keeping GM in the making them worse
category, now the third company that I picked for making cars less reliable is
Volkswagen, they've gone a long way the original Volkswagen Beetle that was
dependable simple to maintain cheap to fix vehicle to their modern high-tech
German computerized monstrosity when they break down, the new beetles
that they don't make anymore they gave up with them there were disaster areas
in terms of repair they used that crazy dual clutch automatic transmissions in
those new beetles I saw people spend five six
thousand dollars or more having those transmissions rebuilt because they were
terrible transmissions and the overuse of plastic into Volkswagens, I got
customers that said I'll never buy another one, the door handles broke over five six
times, the air conditioning compressors would blow up and they'd have to keep
putting different ones on, they just are not solid reliable vehicles like they
were a long time ago, and yeah they sell a lot of cars but then again
McDonald's sells a lot of hamburgers and I wouldn't call them quality hamburgers
good for your health yes volkswagen has a lot of money, they
own Porsche they own Audi but they took all that high technology and threw it in
their Volkswagens, so they're no longer simple vehicles or reliable vehicles and
with the cheating they did on their diesel cars they're not even honest
vehicles, I do have to say in the last 20 years I don't have a single customer who
ever bought a Volkswagen and then went out and bought another Volkswagen, they
said that's it I'll never buy another one of these, now the fourth car brand
I'm picking is mercedes-benz, now I started working on Mercedes Benzes in the late
1960s they were like tanks then they were solid they could last forever now
they did cost a small fortune there's no arguing that they were solid rugged and
reliable, then they started adding layers and
layers of technology and they started making them in places other than Germany
and the German quality just wasn't there when they started making Mercedes Benzes
in the United States they had all kinds of problems now I mean they didn't make
the engines and transmissions there but they assembled the vehicles and they had
wiring harness fails up the wazoo, Mercedes still makes very good engines
and generally very solid transmissions but with some of these cars having
almost a hundred separate computer micro processors on them they age they become
endless money pits I have customers that bought used Mercedes s classes
they paid like twelve thousand dollars for a car that originally was over a
hundred and twenty thousand dollars and you might ask how could that be
that's because everyone knows the things break down as they age
and cost a fortune to repair, now if you don't mind driving one around generally
the engines will still runs and the transmissions will still be shifting but
all the electronics starts to go harwire on those things and being no different than
a lot of other car manufacturers the increased use of plastics, well guess
what the plasticizers eventually vapor out ages especially in the engine
compartment, then all the plastic stuff starts breaking and plastic stuff on
Mercedes and maybe cheaply made but it isn't cheap to buy when they break and
just like Chrysler the hellcat engine is an insane I powerful engine and
Mercedes makes high powerful engines too but the rest of the vehicles Chrysler
and Mercedes as they age they break down a lot and on both of those vehicles
check they're insanely low resale values as they start to get older not a wise
investment really, now the last car manufacturer that I believe their
quality has been going downhill steadily is Nissan, they really made the first
mass-produced sports cars that were fun fast and reliable you never saw that in
a sports car before things started to go downhill as an example for mid-sized
sedans last year the Nissan Altima was rated as the least reliable midsize
sedan especially the ones with CVT transmission over the last couple of
decades have had automatic transmission problems and when they went to CVT
transmissions they had even more problems they own the company that makes
those CVT transmissions it's called Jatco and they actually sell them to lots
of different manufacturers but that's not saying those other manufacturers
aren't making mistakes too, as an example of one of the customers is Subaru
everybody else Subarus have had automatic and CVT transmissions up the
wazoo, but out of all the cars that I work on
the Nissan's have the most CVT problems of any of them that I've seen they just
go out and cost a fortune and normally when they do go out the cost of
rebuilding or replacing that CVT transmission is more than the entire
vehicle is worth so most people just get rid of the cars rather than fix them
Renault took over now they are pretty much in control now
Renault is actually a huge corporation but being big doesn't necessarily mean
better when they took over Nissan the quality really went downhill, you ask
anybody who has my late 90s Nissan there was still pretty well built vehicles but
ask anyone who's owned one in the last 10 years their not gonna say that odds are
my daughter-in-law had one one of the junkies car she ever had it was forever
breaking even though the thing was only like four or five years old and
hilariously enough the muffler fell off now look this is a 94 Celica still has
the original muffler and it's working fine if they can't even well the muffler
on a pipe and keep it on for four years that shows you just their overall
general quality is, so now you know five car brands that have been going downhill
for quite some time and if you're a wise person you might stay away from buying
one, so if you never want to miss another one of my new car repair videos, remember
to ring that Bell!
