Subaru invests $400 million in Indiana plant


That's cool. It'll mean they can produce more of the baseline cars and expand those lines. I'm not sure if it means anything for the sti/wrx platform since those are still made in Japan...

 

Woot!

 

Nice to see Subaru continuing to grow.

 

Yeah. I think for the basic consumer they've made a lot of the right choices. It'd be nice to see them bring the diesel program over and possibly another true compact car like the justy.

I'd like to see them continue to grow that here and return the STI/WRX back to where it belongs... a true budget rally/road smasher. Let the legacy platform have all the fancy heavy stuff. STI/WRX... lighter.. simpler... faster. Period.

 

^well put.
Its nice to see companies bring manufacturing back to the US!

 

Agreed.. I had a discussion about this in class the other day and it seems that its starting to happen slowly.

 

Yes. It's nice to see more and more companies realize that the easy route isn't always the best route.

We have spent the last 20 years outsourcing more and more production to countries like India, China and Denmark. Outsourcing more tech jobs and phone type jobs to places like Jamaica, the Philippines and... well... India.

For the upper end people and the stock holders it makes sense. You want to see revenues go up in order to make your stock value go up. When things slow down for these big companies the way they make their revenue go up is by cutting corners... lowering quality, outsourcing jobs and piling less people with more work. Sooner or later that comes back around to bite you in the butt.

Less jobs means less people spending money. Less people spending money means less people buying your products. Lower quality means more returns and redos.

Then you toss in the increased cost of fossil fuels and it's getting more and more expensive to ship stuff from china to the U.S. and back and forth. And they're wanting more money for what they're providing. All in all that makes the margins smaller and makes it more reasonable to keep it in the states.

Without local support, local jobs there's just no internal support. People can't live on welfare alone and that includes the 1%. Their money is our money. If we don't have money to spend they don't have money to make.

I honestly don't understand how we as a government haven't started to tax companies for outsourcing, tax chinese and other goods more to equalize prices and make agreements... you want to export chinese good... then import US good to china. We don't do that. It's stupid.

It's like trading Lebron James to another team and asking for a hot dog in exchange.

 

+1 very well put. Hopefully we can reach back to the 1950's-1970's were we actually manufactured stuff here and kept a stable economy. For me in short I think its great that Subaru is coming to USA and although they will most likely just be producing base models its a start. The car industry in America is slowly coming back after a huge decline with all those companies going bankrupt

Good luck to SOA

 

Fuji Heavy Industry stock has been on a tear the past three years.

 

The new forester made them a LOT of money.

 

Wow, good for Subaru.

 

I know it would never happen, but I dream of a tiny compact, sort of a combination of a Justy and a Starlet, powered by a small (say 1.6L) boxer motor, and RWD. I don't know why companies don't just try something like that. If Subaru made a basic, fairly econo (like, no luxury crap) hatchback that came in 2 and 4 doors, simple as simple, RWD so the engine could be set back farther in the chassis for better packaging and crash handling, my thought is that it would be a serious contender for a future classic, while still meeting the needs of the "masses" that would be required to make the car a viable possibility for the automaker.

Probably the best thing would be a car that had an engine bay that could accomodate the traditional longitudinal boxer for RWD, but also a transverse inline for FWD versions. That would be hard, but doable.

Truth is, the biggest challenge these days in making a small, light, compact car is safety regulations. My 1991 Justy would not even come close to passing today's requirements, in any aspect of automotive testing.

 

Good to see them succeeding and then reinvesting in one its major marketplaces. Hopefully it all goes thru even tho the yen has gotten weaker recently. I'm sure the recent strength of the yen led to their decision to invest overseas (meaning not in Japan).

 

I could possibly see Subaru bringing over a 1.6L turbo eventually. But I agree that making a small, compact, and truly lightweight car would be really difficult due to current/future safety regulations without costing $$$.

 

Hopefully they don't divert all their RND money towards their better selling cars D: