Quote Originally Posted by O-Dawg View Post
Does the kind of brand loyalty which once defined "Ford families" or "Chevrolet families" still exist?
This was always a more powerful factor in the Detroit ares than elsewhere, for reasons that should be obvious. My father always liked to joke that he and my mother were a "mixed marriage," between a Chrysler family and a Ford family. And, later on, when I started buying Fords, that I had inherited the "Ford gene" from my mother's side of the family.

So the brand loyalty certainly exists in my family, as I can remember my dad driving almost nothing but Chryslers for all of my 50 years. And after my family finally had enough money for two cars, mom always bought Fords. Of course, as it is for so many of us, all of this had its roots in the working history of their families. My mother's father worked at Ford's for over 30 years, both in Highland Park and at Rouge. My father worked his way through college at Chrysler Jefferson Ave., and his father worked at Chrysler for many years after Hudson [[cars, that is) closed.

But I hear this kind of thing less and less these days, and pretty much never outside of Michigan, unless it's people buying Hondas because they "never give me any trouble." It's even on the decline around here, as people's ties to the auto industry wane. And as incomes continue to stagnate and fall, many people are going to be unwilling or unable to buy a new car anyway. Yet another reason why it seems incredibly short-sighted for "our" auto companies to have moved so much of their production away from American middle-class workers [[and car buyers).