and that shows…

Makes you wonder if people thought that Chevrolet, Ford, and Dodge were Japanese that domestic sales would skyrocket. Consumers have no clue. Go figure why complain so much.

Why they* complain so much

why should this even shock anyone.. most college students don’t know the state capitals. why should they know about the automobile industry?

i must say i thought nokia was japanese

@mlm1703: because people in their 30s and 40s are so much better? give me a break.

I can sort of understand the lexus thing, because it only really exists in america; land rover is owned by ford is it not?

sounds like they surveyed county colleges

————–>lol BAMF….hey all these years up until the very second i read this, i thought that Samsung AND nokia was japanese, i wouldn’t have never known otherwise…

Ah, the beauty of consumer ignorance.

———>i’m with jdepould too, i can understand the lexus thing, because up until very recently lexus had only existed in the U.S. and now Japan(i think)…..wait a minute, i got mixed up it was honda that brought Acura to Japan in 2006

and thats because many americans are stupid as hell

These are students who can barely fill the car up with gas, lord help them if they get a flat tire. But then again with Japanese cars made in America and American cars made in Canada you can’t blame them they can be pretty dimwitted. Just because you go to college doesn’t make you smart. Sounds like they surveyed city colleges.

400horseSS that’s funny! you are saying 300 mil people are stupid because of 1000 college students, takes on to know one, I guess.

i cant blame them for thinking that lexus is american because the name sounds american-ish, but land rover????? come on guys . are people really that ignorant???? i must admit i thought nokia was from norway and LG was japanese. lol.

You can have a better time if you ask them where those countries actually are. Ignorance have no boundaries in US.

Oh and LEGO is Danish. I doubt Americans will ever make anything at that level of quality.

Well as a freshman in college. I must say that I’m really not surprised at all at the findings. The funny thing though, is that I actually knew the origin of all of those companies. So at least there’s some hope and that not “all college students don’t know/can’t do *basic knowledge here/instert simple task*”

Yet EVERYONE knows Ferrari is Italian Bellissima!

Reminds me of “Jay-walking”.

Why does this matter at all? Sure, a lot of us live and breathe cars, but the majority of the
American public could care less as long as the car is reliable and reasonably fashionable. Same with electronics makers. Ask a automotive technician what the GNP of the U.S. is and I assure you the numbers would be far worse. It’s just not relevant in people’s lives.

Spiritually, Lexus *IS* an American company. Every one of their models are designed (or re-designed) to cater to US market tastes with very little obvious Japanese identity.

SRT-4Ken… You’re pretty much right. The first lexus dealership was in the US in 1989. In 2005 the Lexus division got to Japan.

I got a question to see who knows this one. Lexus has the self parking LS460, and in the commercial they state “the champaign glasses may seem familiar.” Why are they familiar?

They had full champagne glasses in a tower on the hood of an idling first-gen LS400 in the first commercials.

Too funny, not old enough to remember the original Lexus commercials.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7621622662327174932

they mustve went to community colleges

oops, i guess i showed my age huh?

Americans are stupid, no news flash in this post.

thank you deantj but the real ? is who cares

We now live in a trans-national world. Notions of the ‘nationality’ of a vehicle or its maker are now quaint and became irrelevant back in the ’80’s. What is the defining criteria? Where a car is designed? Assembled? Its parts manufactured? Where (most of) the management team resides? Where the parent organization is located? How about where it’s sold?
And yes, most Americans are ignorant of geography. Many couldn’t find Iraq or Afganistan on a map despite two wars and billions spent there, let alone tell the diffence between China, Japan, or South Korea. Nothing new here.

Stupidity is not the same as ignorance.

Anyway this does not come as a surprise since most Americans think that everything worthwhile is American.

Sad. . . . Who cares

Go on the other side now… see if Canadians can score better, equal, or worse on these tests. Just a thought.

If those college students are representative of the general public in America, it makes you wonder how many more cars Land Rover and Lexus might sell if more people knew they weren’t American (given the public’s perception that American cars are inferior).

And by the way—I am an American, and proud of it. We certainly do have our share of less-than-brilliant people, but even though I’ve never been fortunate enough to travel outside the U.S., I’d be willing to bet that we don’t have the market cornered on stupidity.

The American public is by definition and practice both ignorant and stupid. They are ignorant because they can’t tell China from France on a map. Stupid because they vote the same morons in the two major political parites. in year after year after year. Morons.

So 58% of college students in the US are idiots.

They vote idiots like Clinton and Ted Kennedy into office too.

You have to realize that the typical college-age student in the US was born around 1988.. the last year there wasn’t a Bush or Clinton as President.

this news does not really surprise me… i wouldnt say the average american is dumb or stupid or anything… its just… the average american is mostly unable to see whats beyond the borders of the US of A… (one could - eventhough i refrain from doing so - say behaviour like this is selfcentered or ignorant…)

Though many posts on this page seem to be anti-american, I think the true thing is that most people of most countries are dumb. I remember a piece in the UK 2 years back where a huge % - like 30% or something, thought that Chinese meals, and Pizzas were… British dishes! You just can’t make it up…

When also combined to the fact that a fair % of the population have no interest in cars whatsoever, I am not surprised by these findings in the slightest..

Next!

Though many posts on this page seem to be anti-american, I think the true thing is that most people of most countries are dumb. I remember a piece in the UK 2 years back where a huge % - like 30% or something, thought that Chinese meals, and Pizzas were… British dishes! You just can’t make it up…
Comment by spud, posted on May29 at 6:30 am

Don’t forget that 40% of Scots didn’t realize haggis was native to Scotland

With their reliability you would think so.

@ jdepould… did the article say anything about 30 and 40 years olds? i thought not. that is why my comment is about college students.

And this only covers people who actually respond to car surveys.

Imagine what the actual number is, if you think of all the people who don’t care enough to respond to car surveys.

~shahedc
.

Most people aren’t car people to begin with. Alot of people ask me questions such as… who makes Cadillac… Chevy or Chrysler?

It would be nice if consumers were less ignorant and more demanding.
Maybe then the big corporations wouln’t get away with so much.

Some of my coworkers don’t even know what British Columbia is, let alone Luxembourg or Camaroon and they went to college. So… this is a surprise???

And how exactly does this matter at all? If American college students don’t know that Lexus are Japanese, someone should just tell them and leave it at that, for God’s sake!!

_________lol CTS DRIVER but this article does speak fo itself and a lot of people here can also see the results for themselves

Who makes what just really isn’t relevent to most college students. Most aren’t in the marekt for said cars -heck most probably aren’t in the market for cars at all. I judge how smart/stupid ppl are by the choices they make not how much they know about cars they can’t afford. Now re-electing Bush, that WAS stupid. Except that by most accounts…he cheated (literally).

This is meaningless. As long as I know what a good, reliable brand is, I’m good. I could care less about the state capital of North Dakota… but then again, I have a masters degree.

lotusfire,if re-electing bush was stupid then that means if kerry got elected that would have been a good choice? bush was not undefeatable, kerry was just a horrific choice, the democrats defeated themselves by putting that moron in the election. but to you guys that dont really know any better, kerry was put there to be defeated in order to give hillary a chance for 2008. do you honestly think kerry was the only choice?
its all been politics as usual, and as usual the people suffer due to the fact they have been brainwashed into thinking there are only 2 parties.

Actually you’re all right. IT’s true, most of the planet is comprised of stupid people. Look at homeboy and realize how stupid a Brit can be.

“We certainly do have our share of less-than-brilliant people, but even though I’ve never been fortunate enough to travel outside the U.S., I’d be willing to bet that we don’t have the market cornered on stupidity.”

Sorry I spent more years living in US than any other countries, I even graduated from a well known US university but I must agree that the level of education and intelligence of college students here is far lower than that of most Europe and Asia. The effort I took to graduate with honors in US won’t get me a bachelor degree in countries like Singapore.

OK everyone in the US re idiots and stupid, so I’ll take the internet and you guys can send letters to yourselves.
I guess it takes one to know one guys, and you are proving many points right in your posts, let’s all jump on the bandwagon.

Idiocy is universal so every country has idiots but you foreign pricks like to take shots at America because you’re jealous of our great country. Europe and Asia don’t have better schools we do. Harvard, Princeton, Yale, UVA and many other great schools are here in America. The only really good school in “Europe” is Oxford in England. After that Europe has nothing. You may go ahead and jerk yourself off to your false sense of superiority. That should be US foreign policy from now on, jealous assholes shouldn’t be allowed into the USA.

The problem is the American schools are populated by foreigners. Asians and Indians are educated in the US, not Americans.

It’s a farce. There should be a mandate to lower the cost of getting higher level education, and it should bar foreigners from occupying space in American institutions. Then America will start producing more than 60,000 American engineers a year (compared to Japan’s 250,000). Instead the engineers it does produce just go back to Asia and India and compete against the US.

We teach the rest of the world how to beat us instead of teaching our own citizens how to beat the rest of the world. Brilliant.

Need for Speed, after 9/11 it’s much harder for foreign students to study in US, so theoretically it’s already in effect. Regardless, the schools you mentioned are only a few compared to the greater numbers of comparable schools in other countries but they are simply not as well known. A better estimate should be taken from the overall population and US is already inferior when it comes to math and science. Thus the cheaper, non-complaining (can’t speak English anyway), smarter workers in India and China…

its not a matter of foreigners being taught how to beat you… if the grand old nation had enough people willing to study AND mentally able to study, you wouldnt have such a mess… (dont tell me school fees are a problem… the foreigners, some people seem to be so afraid of, have to pay those fees, too… plus, ever heard the word scholarship?)… problem is… asians are eager to learn, americans mostly arent

(take a look at a random campus… the ones hanging around, chillin are the american students… the ones learning hard are the asian students… )

dont tell me their geeks… maybe they are… but for sure those geeks are the ones who will go on beating your country, when they got their grade A diploma…

Wow I found the aritcle really interesting. I wonder what the results would be if you asked another large bunch of people totally un interested in cars in any other country would be? Probably exactly the same except they might not think stuff was made in america but their country or one that they get most of their imports from.
Ease up on the racial hatred there people on both sides. The world has no real borders anymore and all the companies mention are transnational countries. As long as they feed your local economy who cares where the ultimate head office is.

The problem is american youth have too little passion for mathematics/science anymore. The cold war days when we were creating tons of math/science graduates (especially people with graduate degrees) are gone. Today universities are full of 80s and 90s children who just view it as a place they’re expected to go but are just going to have fun for 4-5+ years. They’re more interested in a degree that’s easy to recieve and will earn them the most money rather than intellectual growth and contributing to society (hence it seems like so many american students are in non-academic degrees). We need to renew interest in and respect for math and science.

You also have to remember that the numbers for engineering graduates coming out of asia are somewhat skewed because many countries include 2-3 year technical degrees (sometimes in things we woudln’t even considering “engineering” in the US) in that figure (and why wouldn’t they considering it will attract US businesses and help their economies).

The US still has and will most likely continue to have some of the greatest reasearch universities in the world as well as other research institutions (IBM, XEROX PARC, Sandia, JPL, Bell Labs, etc). Many graduate students come from outside the US for this reason.

India and China smarter nah. China is definitely sneaky and they like ripping off American car designs half of their cars can’t go more than 100 per tank or so. One car had a range of 60 miles. We’ll get our **** together AGM just watch. I’m no math whiz yet but I do think the complicated stuff is kind of interesting, albiet it’s on a tv show called Numb3rs but it’s interesting never the less. I do have an interest in Science.

Americans are stupid.
Anyone who thinks a toyota camry with an “L” on the hood is a luxury car is stupid. Even stupider is paying luxury-car money for one!

“I got a question to see who knows this one. Lexus has the self parking LS460, and in the commercial they state “the champaign glasses may seem familiar.” Why are they familiar?”

I woudn’t know — after owning a Toyota, I hate them so much I don’t even watch their commercials all the way through

Need for Speed: ever heard of the Sorbonne?

And who cares what an “American” car is?

^^have you seen the new audi commercial? a car for drivers who know how to park! you see a parking space sitting there empty….then all of the sudden an audi comes ripping onto the scene sideways, tires squealing and slides sideways into the spot. love it, friggin hilarious.

________over here they have their own channel which is basically one big audi advert that is one 24/7/365 in which 100% of the time they talk about how ground braking and cool and safe their cars are (apart from the Q7 which apparently isnt safe because in a crash the area around the driver collapses badly and injures him/her and also they have rubbish safety records or something, does anyone here have anymore info on this??)

idiots