Plastic for cooling sucks.

Watch the show or read the comics of Dilbert, one of the very few series that accurately portrays what it's like to work as an engineer for a big American corporation. He constantly struggles with clueless leadership trying to get unrealistic goals done unrealistically fast with unrealistically low funding. And of course when it fails, he and the engineering team get blamed for it.

IMO this is an area the Asians and Europeans have the edge. Senior management positions in companies based in those countries are expected to have some level of technical background. Here it's just about managing and selling stuff, making a quick buck for the year and making investors and shareholders (and the Fed) happy. Same goes for gov entities like the EPA, we all know the people there who try to make regulations on vehicles really know their stuff :rolleyes::rolleyes:

Not to say Euro and Asian cars don't have design flaws but from their perspective, cars aren't expected to last more than 5-10 years anyway. They intentionally design stuff to fail after a certain amount of time, and they've gotten really good at figuring out how design something "just barely good enough".

Compare a Mercedes car from the 1970s-80s to one today, there is no comparison. Or a 1990s-00s Honda to one today, similar deal.