Comment by linksnapzz
9 hours ago
>When Americans discover again how crappy their cars are compared to what's >available elsewhere, like we did with Japan
No, that's not what happened. Japanese manufacturers made cars in the US, to match US tastes. Japanese cars as sold in Japan, were not models Americans would buy.
>In the meantime, this incredibly short sighted protectionism will end just like >the last round did.
It'll end with...Chinese cars made in US factories w/ American workers? Chinese V8 pickup trucks failing to win market share against the US competition?
That's not the history that I recall. Let's look at Honda, just as an example.
Honda started selling cars in the US in 1970, with their quirky, tiny, Japan-made N600.
The Civic didn't happen until 1973, and it was also a Japanese-built car. Bigger than the N600 but still very small by American standards, it was the right car at the right time for the oil crisis the US was beginning to face. They sold a lot of Civics to Americans, despite the strong anti-Japanese sentiment around that time.
It wasn't until 1982 that Honda started building cars in the States, with the introduction of the Honda plant in Marysville, Ohio that began building Accords.
But even then: They still didn't build all of the USDM Accords in Marysville; many were still built in Japan and imported. It took additional years for the transition to fully occur.
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That's 12 years from the time that they started selling cars in the US, to the time when they began to build their US-market cars in the US.
(If 12 years sounds like a short period of time, remember: We've only had the Tesla Model 3 for about 9 years now.)
US cars in the late 70s and early 80s sucked, you just had to be there to know how bad they were.
The Japanese made cars for the US that were different than local cars, but they were also different from what the US was making.