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!