cars

The Best Time of Year to Buy Item X

The Best Time of Year to Buy Item X

By consumerist.com 1.23.06

God bless this no-nonsense column over at CNNMoney that explains with a minimum of cruft when exactly is the best time to buy everything—if everything is airline tickets, televisions, houses, cars, videogames, and toys. Here’s the bit about airline tickets that you can put in your pocket right now for it is as simple as the organism sure to infect you on your next flight:

For all the seeming complexity that goes into the price of airfare, the answer to when some of the cheapest tickets can be found is surprisingly simple: Wednesday.

Failing Enterprise: Rent-A-Car Corral

Failing Enterprise: Rent-A-Car Corral

By consumerist.com 1.3.06

Renting cars is a monumental pain in the rear. (We have our own saga that we will probably be discussing in the near future.) We don’t have a particular preference for rental agencies, as they all seem bound by a byzantine set of regulations and limitations that are designed to extract every dollar while at the same time limiting your ability to actually rent a vehicle.

Mini Luges Down Building, Explodes & Craters

Mini Luges Down Building, Explodes & Craters

By consumerist.com 12.30.05

Yesterday – in our Cool, Innovative Advertising? post – we wrote about advertisers that “got it”, who managed to briefly make the world a cooler, more surreal place for their intended audience/suckers. Of course, sometimes that daily dose of surreality isn’t the masterstroke of some hip marketing guru, but the result of butterfingers with a bolt gun. The lads over at Billboardom have a great story about an ad campaign in Toronto in which a luger, frozen counter-gravitationally in time, uses a Mini Cooper to luge down a building. Except the Mini went plummeting off the side of the building, cratered, then erupted into what one can only hope was a fiery explosion 10 stories down. Absolutely awesome. Thankfully, no one was hit by the car on the way down, which is good news from a humanitarian perspective but leaves us twitching at our computer with a line about the impact of advertising on the average consumer that now, alas, can never be used.

The $10k Car: Should We Feel Bad for Buying a Geely?

The $10k Car: Should We Feel Bad for Buying a Geely?

By consumerist.com 12.20.05

Next year’s Yugo is set to be the Chinese-made Geely 7151 CK—pronounced “JEE-lee,” as in “fra-gi-le.” The mid-sized sedan will be hitting our shores for around $10,000, making it by far the cheapest car in its class. But can you, in good conscience, purchase it?

Geely’s average cost for workers in China is $3.50 an hour. That compares with hourly labor costs of $73.73 for GM.

Considering the quality of cars coming out of GM over the last ten years, we think you most certainly can. Japanese and Korean cars started out as bargain-basement alternatives to Detroit steel, and even at current prices, tend to offer a much better car for the money. If the Geely ends up being a quality product, we welcome the destruction of one of America’s primary exports.

The Sucks Site Review: MitsubishiSucks.com

The Sucks Site Review: MitsubishiSucks.com

By consumerist.com 12.9.05

MitsubishiSucks.com is an odd duck in the Suck Site menagerie. While the genesis of most Suck Sites is a bad product or interaction with a company, MitsuSuko (our new abbreviation) seems to hate Mitsubishi primarily for their actions in World War II.

In Korea, Japanese firms used about 5 million Koreans as slave laborers, Oh Heun Kwon of Los Angeles was a slave labor at a Mitsubishi shipbuilding plant in Japan in 1944 of whom about 250,000 were taken to Japan, said a lawyer for plaintiffs seeking compensation from firms like Nippon Steel U.S.A. Inc. and Mitsubishi Corp. 500,000 Filipinos served as slave laborers, according to him.

Oh come on. If we refused to shop at every company that enslaved a few hundred thousand Filipinos we’d never be able to wear any shoes, let alone shop for cars or electronics.

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