I'll never buy _______ again!!!

Well we had bad experience with Ford's customer service about 10 years ago, or rather say their lack of it. To me it all comes down to the service provided than the product. I understand that no one makes a perfect product. However how you deal with a customer when your product fails, speaks volumes about your company, and around 10 years ago Ford lost my business and my families business due to their lack of service for 2 lemons produced by them that we had in our posession.

Also another company I dont want anything to deal with as far as their service goes is Abit. Granted their product is crappy, but really got me to never buy anything of theirs again was their disdain they showed me 2 years ago on a bad batch of motherboards I had bought produced by them. They treated me like I was nothing to them.

In stark contrast companies that have won me over thru customer support are Dell and GM (yes I said GM)

In the 80's my mom had a pontiac grand prix that blew the motor like 1000 miles out of warranty. Being too young to remember at that time what caused it, I remember Dad saying that after talking with GM service, we got a new engine free of charge in the car plus free oil changes for a year. Since then we've been a pre dominantly GM family, with the except of my sister who keeps believe in the hype that japanese cars will always be built better forever than any domestic brand, even though she has been burned twice by mitsubishi. Course with her, its never about sense, its always about "image"

But back to what I was saying, no one makes an infalliable product, however the way a company treats its customers when something goes wrong is what I use to determine if I will buy from them or not.

I supposedly will never buy a Ford product, but only because I made a 1989 promise to myself never to do business with Ford as a result of a cheesy and rotten thing Ford Motor Credit did to me when I was trying to help a girlfriend out of a jam.

She was two months behind on payments, and I called Ford Motor Credit to let them know I was coming in to write a check for the missed payments. They agreed to this provided I bring the payment in that afternoon and told them where the car was so they could repossess it the next day if I didn't come in with a check. I was not to move the car until the payment was made.

Using my own car, I drove to the office and went in with the check an hour later and gave it to the lady at the window. She made a phone call and gave the check back to me.

"What's up?", I asked.

"They're towing the car now", she said.

Angry and bewildered, I called the individual who had made the agreement with me and asked him what happened...

"Why did you tow the car?!", I demanded. "We agreed that I would give you a check today and my girlfriend's account would be made current! Why did you agree to that if you had already decided you were going to repossess it anyway?!"

"I needed to know where the car was", he said smugly, "and getting you to agree to this was an easy way to find out."

...lovely. Just lovely.

And I'm not talking about some hole-in-the-wall collection agency where people scheme like this in smoky backrooms--this was Ford Motor Credit Company. I was extremely angry, and vowed never to buy a Ford product of my own.

Anyway, Ford and its collection of brands represent a number of very nice cars that I would buy, and definitely would have bought in the past had I not made this promise to myself. But, the fact is, I made the promise, and I'm true to my word. I've never bought any Ford product, and have even avoided "sort-of" Ford products.

For example, when we were shopping for an RV a few years ago, we looked at a few different Winnebagos--some were on Chevy chassis and some were on Ford chassis. I deliberately avoided Ford chassis models because of my boycott.

...then again, I'm sure I'll figure out some sort of loophole if Ford or any of its brands offer something that I can't live without at some point.

I guess people feel strongly about things (cars in particular) because they spend a lot of time and money on them. Personally, I can say this about my experience with GM:

I'm pretty sure that Bob Lutz or someone from General Motors apologized a few months back saying that the quality of GM's cars up until the late 90s was definitely not up to par. I've heard of very very many problems with mid-90s Malibus, Grand Ams, Monte Carlos, Grand Prixs... etc etc. This goes way past interior quality and gap spaces. There are many safety issues with these vehicles. GM never came forward to help people with their problems.

It's not that GM made a bad car way back in the late 80s and early 90s. It's more that GM made bad cars all the way up until a few years ago and they never cared to take responsibility for it until a couple months ago. Now they are trying to use it as a media ploy to show people that their new vehicles are a departure from the old and that they are concerned about quality.

I'm not convinced. It's easy to say that the new cars are better, but only time will tell if this is the case. Some of GM's new vehicles seem better, but while GM is making better vehicles, the imports are too. Because the imports were already ahead, GM will need to cover more ground if they ever wish to surpass.

GM does not always stand behind their product. My car is pure evidence of that. If you don't know what happened, read my topic in the complaint section. I probably won't own a GM product again. GM never came forward to help.. they didn't care.

It's not that GM didn't know that their cars were bad.. it's just that they didn't care. That allows me and more than half of America to not like GM and allows us to hold a grudge.

I had a terrible reliability out of my 94 Z28, and so did two of my best friends with their 98 Z28 and 98 Trans Am.

Because of that, I would never buy an f-body again until they came out with a ground-up redesign and it was getting rave reviews.

Along those same lines, I always take news of a 'great' new Chrysler vehicle that just came out or is about to come out, with a grain of salt. In my experience Chrysler vehicles like to carry a lot of initial hype only for people to turn around 3-4 years later and call the car a POS.

There are people that hold grudges, but I am not one of them. I simply observe consistant behavior from a car company, learn from it, and make sure to look beyond the surface of any of their cars.

There are other car companies where they have such a consistant track record for making great cars that you can pretty much just look at the car on the surface and if you like how it drives, you can safely just assume that it's going to be a fairly reliable car.

That's not to say that consistantly bad car companies never build good cars, or that they can't change after 5-10 years of revamping... just look at the new direction GM has been heading recently... from what I've seen in recent times and from what I've read and observed in person, I'd say the GTO is the first car interior I've seen GM put out in ages that I would feel comfortable with.