Originally posted by MrFatbooty
So what if they're not American GM engineers? They're still GM engineers. Pretty much every car company has regional design offices and engineering staffs that have their products distributed worldwide.
If you want to think of it as a "home market" kind of thing, look at the Acura MDX and USDM Honda Odyssey. Both of those cars were designed by Honda North America and are only built in Canada. Yet Honda imports them from Canada for sale in Japan.
i'm saying it is different because GM couldn't do it by themselves (in detroit) even if their survival depended on it. i don't think honda depends on their foreign branches to produce excellent cars - they do that all over the place. but it seems that GM does depend on their foreign subsidaries to create innovative automobiles because they simply can't produce anything worth anything domestically. if they could have, they would have done it long ago. instead they just kept pumping out sub-par pontiacs, oldsmobiles, buicks, saturns... even their classic names like firebird and camaro fail them
if the only successful/unique/innovative cars honda had in japan were cars designed elsewhere in the world, that would be something to compare. but since that isn't the case, i don't think its a justified comparison