Still off topic - I kinda wonder, how many car companies **should** the US have - that will be answered if we skip the bailout and let them fail.


On topic - I look at it 3 ways. a car has 3 parts from up to 3 different nations:

1) the nation of the manufactured product - what country it is actually built in. This nation benefits from manufacturing jobs created, and hurts from real estate/emissions/trash produced.

2) the nation of the design/engineering team - they do a large portion of the car (and dictate some of the quality control measures/DFM/machineing tolerances etc...) and are thusly (imho) 1/3rd of the value of the car
This nation pretty much only benefits from the engineering/design jobs. This step generates little detrimental effect on a country

I probably included this as 1/3'rd the value of a car because I am an Engineer =)

3) the nation of the management - they approve the production of the car, support (or not) dealer networks, and handle finances (or not =) The profit (if any) from the sale of the car gets managed by people from this country.
This nation gets to tax or subsidize the company that orders the building of the cars.

For instance - ML class- 1/3rd american (built in AL) , 2/3rds german (designed and funded from .de)
example 2 - Ford F-150 - 3/3rd's american.


This is a simplified view of things (...both fords and ML's have non-american parts in them, Alabama engineers can influence the production process/cost to produce....) but I think that it is a good tool for evaluating the true "country of origin" or a car


-John

__________________
2009 Kia Sedona
2009 Honda Odyssey EX-L
12006 Jetta Pumpe Duse
(insert Mercedes here)

Husband, Father, sometimes friend =)