ebonyandivory wrote: Since I started this thread, I feel like I can hijack it a bit. I'm REALLY disliking the sharing of platforms. I get the Infinity/Nissan stuff for example, thats not what i mean. Its when you pay the money for a Volkswagen but get a prettied up Caravan (we love our Caravans btw) its annoying to me. The Volvo/Ford is another. Saabaru, and on and on. I HATE IT! I don't make these judgements based on the quality of outcome either as I think the Saabaru is a nice ride.
Why do you hate it? If it works, it works.
From the 1954 Giulietta to the 1975 Alfetta- all of the small cars in between then shared the exact same platform for Alfa. Seemed to work pretty well.
The Saab 9000, Alfa 164, and Lancia Thema were all jointly developed on a common platform- all of them were totally different cars. Saves a lot of money sharing the effort.
And I'm not sure why you think the Volvo platform in Fords were so bad- the 500 and later Taurus were much better cars than previous Taurus. And safer. Seems to keep working well in it's more updated versions. It's not as if the Volvo was losing something- I don't think anyone would confuse an C80 for a Taurus or MKS- or whatever the equivallent is.
Money matters. That one platform share could be shown to save Ford and Volvo at the same time.
What I had hoped for as a platform share- a Mercury based off of a Miata, RX7, or RX8. That would have been really nice. Alas, it will never happen.
