Subaru. They intentionally keep their company small, were the first ones to treat the gay community as a real market segment, and they don’t allow their dealers to pull any of that “market adjustment” crap with their pricing. Their cars are really good, comfortable, and well thought out so it’s easy for home mechanics to do basic maintenance if they need to save a buck, especially since they never require any special, brand/model specific tools. Their safety ratings are also impeccable and I trust them to truly care about the well-being of their customers. Also, as a bonus, from my 2003 Legacy to my 2015 BRZ I actually fit in the cars as a 6’-5” guy which is just awesome that they make shit I can drive.
I hate corporations as much the next guy but if there was ever an example of something as big as a mainstream car company being good they’re absolutely the best without much argument.
And even in the modern era they've cut some corners, like with the na EJ engine's cheap headgaskets, where instead of recalling and upgrading to the multi-layer steel ones that should've been there in the first place, they made a Subaru additive part of regular maintenance - this additive being, essentially, rebottled stop-leak. Just good enough to get through the warranty period.
If they leave the WW2 demons in the past then that’s fine by me. Others seem perfectly fine doing some incredibly horrific shit.
And look, I know the headgasket thing, which I appreciate you not blowing out of proportion in what I think is the first time ever, was not their greatest shining moment. But I was relatively clear about talking in partially relativistic terms and, for example, GM let people die because they figured lawsuits would be cheaper than recalls in regards to their faulty ignitions. There’s a shitty business decision among a great money good ones and there’s sacrificing people’s lives because it’ll maybe save a buck.
If they do heinous shit in the future I’m not going to defend them, and I won’t defend actions semi-recently taken, but until I hear about how they’re gouging customers, foregoing safety, and releasing a steady stream of garbage with no intention to fix it then I refuse to paint them with the same brush as almost every other major automaker on the planet. They’re not saints but they’re pretty fucking solid in some pretty fucking important ways.
Tesla ships garbage and tells you to pray they’ll push an update, Musk would expand the company as far as possible and is only not doing that because he is allergic to good decisions, and safety doesn’t matter one sliver of a crumb to them as evidenced by innumerable articles on the subject. I really have no idea how you came to that conclusion unless you marched straight by any shred of nuance or critical thinking, believed the hype, and reduced the arguments down so far as to make them the same as arguing that a cat and a giraffe are the same because they’re both quadrapeds.
I wanna hear what they have to say about GM, one of the famously awful ones, and awful in very recent history. They’re either racist or stupid and that would probably tell the story.
I agree almost anything is better than giving Elon money, but make no mistake, the auto industry is one massive global capitalistic racket, which will do anything to get ahead