Comment by ssl-3

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.)