Why are the nicest and most impressive cars that GM has to offer come from Europe and Australia? Are American engineers and designers that much backwards when compared with engineers and designers from overseas? Even the mustang and corvette were designed by Asian engineers.

moto-racer13, most of engineering education occurs in US. The best colleges and institutes are right in the US. The student population in those is diverse, like in any institution, however in most engineering disciplines classes are usually 80 of Asian descendants or origin. Vast majority of those students start their career in US as well working for “not so Big 3″ or foreign transplants. Since our country is designed to be a melting pot it is actually a good development: US has a good hold on the best and brightest.

meant “80%”

Xyunya I have to disagree about the best schools being in the US. Oxford in England is the very best university in the world, and France has the best engineering school in the world. I know because I spent 4 years studying there. There were lots of Americans that I met studying at European technical universities. You have to realise, in Europe, the average student in grade 6 is already studying mathematics that the average US student begins to study in the first year of highschool. Most of the foreign students you see in American Universities are the ones that come from poor countries that don’t have proper technical educational facilities.

Hopefully, the next round they can fix all the problems with the current car, because the Aura we have now? Outside of the drivetrain, the car is a major piece of doodoo.

Traffic sign recognition? How about steering that doesn’t groan or bust **** off? How about a reliable transmission?

The current Aura looks better than its clones (G6/Malibu/9-3) and the interior, while cheap in places is much more paletable than the el-cheapo Pontiac and the pshycadelic Bu’, they just need to up the quality.

Hell, what am I saying, Saturn is a lost fockin cause. Even with a fresh product line, sales suck and the company hasn’t made a profit in 15 years. Put a fork in it and save this great looking design for Pontiac to replace the aweful G6.

moto-racer13, I am not disputing the value of education at Oxford, Cambridge, Sorbonne, Plank Institute etc.; however MIT, Ivy League, U of Chicago, CalTec, U of Michigan and another 10-25 names will overshadow European schools in shear number of academia achievements and quality of students attending them. Our quantitative advantage becomes qualitative one. The only concern I have that large number of science and technology students are not products of US educational system and I agree with you to a point, that our high schools produce large number of illiterates especially in scientific education. This deficiency is compensated by private school system and small number of excellent public schools. Unfortunately, education system is broken on national level and perhaps based on our federation political structure is not fixable.

xyunya; Thats about right. US has more nerds and illiterates then anyone there is room for everyone in America.

get a ford

You can give Saturn all the product you want and good or bad it won’t matter. They burned their bridge with the Ion and the L Series, both were not only of dismal quality but two of the ugliest designs to ever be allowed out of Detroit and that’s saying something. That’s the Saturn people remember and those are the customers they’re never going to get back.

What I want is, when I go to the beach, for this car to recognize which chick has the hottest body with perky B or C cups and then from this subset to determine which bikini is the most see-thru and steer me toward her after I grab a 5-for-1 Big Mac special and a large shake.

THAT’s what technology is for.

moto-racer13 wrote (No. 4): … Oxford in England is the very best university in the world, and France has the best engineering school in the world. I know because I spent 4 years studying there. There were lots of Americans that I met studying at European technical universities. … in Europe, the average student in grade 6 is already studying mathematics that the average US student begins to study in the first year of highschool. Most of the foreign students you see in American Universities are the ones that come from poor countries that don’t have proper technical educational facilities.

You are mixing things that have nothing to do with the quality of the universities. In the US, scientists and engineers by and large come from the ranks of the poor and working classes. Many are the children of immigrants. The coal mines of West Virginia and Pennsylvania and the steel mills of Pennsylvania are over-represented among the ranks of our scientists and engineers.

You have a solid argument about the relative quality of the primary and secondary schools in the USA and Europe. However, they are not at issue here. We are talking about universities, not grade schools.

There are many ways to measure quality. However, the most relevant measure of the quality of a university is its production. We have a saying: “The bottomline is the bottomline.” Look at the bottomline production of US universities. The personal computer industry is an outgrowth of Harvard and Stanford. Stanford University also gave rise to SUN Microsystems (Stanford University Network) and SGI, which was created as a Stanford University engineering graduate school classroom project. The web browser as we know it came out of the University of Illinois. The web’s predecessor, GOPHER, came out of the University of Minnesota. Apple’s MacOS X is based primarily on work done by the University of California (Berkeley) and Carnegie-Mellon University. High-temperature superconductivity’s university developer was the University of Houston.

I can go on, but hopefully you get the point. Can you name two major developments that were produced directly or indirectly by European universities? Can you name one?

@ Richard
Boston University is the world’s best

Why can’t anyone expect the driver to have enough sense to read the damn sign themselves? Oh, it’s a Saturn. I just answered my own question.

Richard, I agree with you, but don’t discount Europe yet. Most (not all) scientists who developed the first nuclear bomb came from Europe and interestingly enough none from “Ivy League” level.
There is a lot of research done in Europe. There is difference between government involvement in research in US and Europe. We have a bit more religion and politics involved here then we really need.
There is a lot of politics and political correctness involved in acceptance into Ivy level institutions. Having two children in Ivies, I know first hand that not all smartest and brightest get in (95% attrition rate during admission process). There geniuses for whom school fight (1-3% of the class), there are 30-40% legacies and donors, 10-20% all social and racial representation and the rest you average A student with 2380-2400 SAT score and ambulance volunteer experience. Per my math (depending on its precision) 40-60% of class will not invent penicillin. I don’t think this political decease affects Europe or what the effect is.

shaver, those nerds most likely had better grades then you did, have significantly more disposable income and post here. Cheers.

beantownslut, Boston U’s domain per US News & World Report

54. University of Maryland—College Park *

57. Ohio State University—Columbus *

57. Boston University

59. Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey—New Brunswick(NJ) *

There are 55 schools better then it is and over 400 worse then it is.

56 better schools than Boston U if you include my kindergarten.

xyunya wrote (No. 14): … I agree with you, but don’t discount Europe yet. Most (not all) scientists who developed the first nuclear bomb came from Europe and interestingly enough none from “Ivy League” level. …

Nobody is discounting European research. However, most of the people who built the first nuclear bomb had already moved to the US and stayed here. Among them were Einstein, Fermi, Teller, and Heisenberg. After World War II, they took positions at US universities and helped secure their positions as the best on Earth.

moto-racer13 at #4, your comment is just circular. I will defer the European vs. American Universities debate to those who already wrote about it.

Regarding your comment, first, you said Europe has the very best school because their students receive better Math training in grade school.

Second, you said there are a lot of American students, including you who enter and study at these great European school, but these are the same American students with poorer Math training in American grade schools that you alleged.

Third, you said “[m]ost of the foreign students you see in American Universities are the ones that come from poor countries that don’t have proper technical educational facilities.” You failed to mention if these poor countries have better or worse Math training in grade school comparing to average America.

Your reasoning is very confusing and makes no sense. In any regard, universities, European and American all recruit world-wide, so I am not sure if grade school Math training plays that significant of a role. Also, you seem to be suggesting that foreign students coming from countries without proper technical educational facilities are worse students. I tend to find foreign students a little more focus in college, whether their home countries have proper technical educational facilities or not. Ultimately, your comment is prejudicial in saying European students > American students > foreign students in America.

Richard, minor comment, if anyone want s to continue this thread. Einstein, Fermi, Teller, and Heisenberg did not move, they escaped to US, not exactly emigrants seeking better economic opportunities. And that’s goes to the heart of my point: US is both the safe heaven and intellectual fertile ground for the rest of the world. Old European schools don’t have that clout.