Yeah... except from what I was reading in Automobile and elsewhere, Toyota was the only one who actually planned on bringing their JDN cars over - first with the Scions, then with the Yaris. The Versa and especially the Fit were (supposedly) last minute additions to the lineup in order to compete with Scion/the Yaris. Per my Nissan dealer, they weren’t actually expecting the Versa with the new Sentra. They weren’t expecting a vehicle in the Versa’s class at all. I would guess the Honda dealers were equally surprised.
Also, none of those three are actually new cars. All of them are actually Japanese market or European market cars that were brought over here. The Versa is the Nissan Tiida, the Fit is the Jazz, the Yaris is the Vitz or Belta.
Oh, and I don’t think anyone thinks that the Fiesta will turn around Ford, at least not anyone with a clue. What Ford would need to do would be to fire everyone in their US car design division that isn’t a Mustang engineer and replace them with the European or Australian design division. They design and produce much better cars than we get here.
Ford could turn themselves around by selling the Falcon, the Mondeo, the Fiesta (of course), the actual Transit (not the Connect), the Euro Focus, and of course, the aforementioned Galaxy. But, aside from the Fiesta, they won’t.
As for the Contour: What went wrong was typical UAW shoddy build quality. A friend bought a Mystique when it was new, pulled on the glove box and had the ENTIRE dashboard come away from the firewall. He’s got pics, too. The rest of the car had similar quality control issues. That tends to make people not want to buy your product in a hurry.
About the only US Contour worth buying was the SVT model, and that was because they were pretty much all hand selected and hand made.
Holy cow. I didn’t know about Contour/Mystique issues like that! Thought that kind of stuff stopped in the 70’s. I’ve heard about wiring harnesses tied in knots, beer cans inside the doors, and even Harley-Davidsons sent out without pistons. Dashboard detachment is a new one for me.
I don’t know about firing the US car design division. Maybe they could woo some designers from Honda or Toyota US over to Ford. I’ve heard that the American market Accord and Camry are designed mostly by Americans. They design quality cars, and they know what Americans want. (Plus a few of those Euros and Aussies could be thrown in for good measure.)