AnimalMother117: I don't live in Australia and am not familiar with prices there, but I do tend to think of small hatchbacks as particularly cool. It may be out of your price range, but I love my Mini Cooper, it's always a blast to drive, but may be a bit small to use for a comfortable trip. Toyota Yaris/Vitz is pretty cool, I think anyway. Hyundai Accent is good also, but I view it as somewhat feminine, despite the only people I know of owning one being men. I naturally don't recommend any American cars. I also really like the Mitsubishi Eclipse, but they stopped making them, and it's only a two seater, but man did it look cool.
AnimalMother117: I would really like it if they would sell Daihatsu here, I would buy a kei car if they would sell them. Particularly the Copen. Still don't know about AU price, but I also like the Fiat 500 family of vehicles.

mystikmind2000: Yes, Toyota Yaris or Dihatsu Serion. But i would never touch any of the big name French cars, not in a million years! I have so many bad stories with friends and family, all the brands. Also I worked at a parts distribution centre which handled a number of different brands of car, one of them was Peugeot. I saw with my own eyes the vast numbers of replacement parts being shipped out for Peugeot, much more than any other brand there, even ones with far larger market share!! Peugeot - what a piece of ..... So if that's how the French car industry thinks they can treat their customers, to hell with them.

AnimalMother117: I don't think I've ever seen a French car, living in America and all the vast majority of cars you see in my AO are Japanese and American with quite a few German cars where my dad works, to return to the original posting. Yeah, I have typically heard ill of French cars from those of they who have experienced them. While I do like some of the "big impressive sport/super cars" I typically have more of a fondness for the small "fun" cars like the ones described above.

Strijkbout: French cars/technology is very underappreciated to be honest, Citroën for example was one of the most innovative carmanufacturers for a long time, yes their airsuspension was a mechanics nightmare but they were also the first to massproduce frontwheeldriven cars.
I think the French mostly see cars as an expendable good and they drive them until the wheels fall of, in which case they go to the cardealer and buy a new one.

hedwards: He probably chose to include a clause about not destroying the car, which rendered that clause unenforceable.

AnimalMother117: For instance my grandparents have owned a Porsche 944 for the past 25+ years, and they don't seem to have any intention of selling it anytime soon.

Strijkbout: Well that is the whole thing, if you live in a country where traffic is for the most part sane a Porsche will last an eternity.
The same Porsche will be a battered dustbin if it has been a few times in Paris or Rome. =P

mystikmind2000: I think the smart car manufacturers realize that a young person buying their first crappy second hand car will one day be a new car customer.

So if that first impression given by that old crappy car is a very bad one, then they will never buy that same brand of car in their choice of new car.

I think the above statements underline exactly why Toyota is the leading car manufacturer in the world today. And why the opposing short sightedness of other car manufacturers towards this issue is what put them in the looser position they are in today.

Edit: oh and i forgot word of mouth.... those cars which are not made to last will soon gain a bad reputation right at the lower end of the market where young people are buying their first crappy car and those young people will remember those cars to be avoided and then avoid that brand again when buying a new car.

And if you make cars that don't even reach that far due to very short term thinking then the word for that is 'Deawoo'

AnimalMother117: It's interesting you bring that up because my mom's first car was a mid-seventies Mustang and my father's first car was a Chevy Vega (I think anyway) and those two anymore make a habit of not buying from those respective brands. Now while my father had an "okay" experience with his car ( I believe he said "It was transportation" as his perspective) my mom truly hated that car, for not starting sometimes, stalling, and other mechanical issues with it, now to be fair it was her first car and she probably wasn't very mechanically savvy. For what it's worth when she got her first real job she bought herself a brand new Supra from '89 which was my older brother's first car.

Speaking of my dad's cars he also owned the one Camaro which never needed any serious work done on it for the five or so years he drove it, but typically prefers Japanese or German cars.

mystikmind2000: If you know how to look after a car properly, you can just about keep any old crap working reliably, but that is not what testifies to quality. It is the old cars that keep running despite horribly lacking care that is the true testament to quality, and my parents did not look after their cars very much at all.

Their first car was a Hilman Hunter which they said was a piece of garbage. Their next car was an old Ford falcon late 60's or early 70's model and that car was basically a freak of nature, you could not kill it, not with years of abuse! And listen to me, seriously, when they say that they don't make them like they used to, they are talking about Fords of this era!!!!!!

mystikmind2000: But that's all debatable, and i could probably drive one of those newer diesels to great advantage using the right driving techniques. But what is of far more significance in my case is the price range. diesel cars in my price range are much older and less efficient, that combined with the fact that the diesel engine is slower, i could simply get a smaller petrol engine to do the same job and because the petrol engine is smaller, it uses less fuel than the diesel!

Plus diesel is quite a bit more expensive at the pump in Australia.