The American economy cars tend to be worse than japanese cars. i think that has something to do with the fact that America has only been really producing them for about 30 years, where as Japan has been making small affordable, reliable cars for closer to 50 years.
Prior to the gas crisis in the late 70s American companies either built big reliable family cars, or sports cars like the Corvette and the Thunderbird.
Not all american cars are poorly built and unreliable junk heaps. My car has 113,000 hard miles and besides regular maintaince, im only running about $100 a year in repair bills. Mine is actually not very high milage compared to other cars like it. It is not uncommon for them to go 200, 300 even 400,000 miles on the original engine.
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