Before the 1973 Oil Embargo, compared to the Japanese cars, American cars were crap. They got gas mileage in the teens (13-19mpg) and if it lasted 100,000 miles, you counted it “a good one.”
At the same time, Japanese cars got 30+ mpg and would run like a Swiss watch for 200,000 miles (in no small part thanks to American engineer W. Edwards Deming). But Americans just wouldn’t buy them because they were tiny in comparison to big American land yachts, and we still hadn’t got over that whole “Pearl Harbor” thing.
That changed when the price of gasoline went up 40% almost overnight because the Arabs cut off oil imports to the US on account of Dick Nixon supporting the Jews in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Everntually Detroit made up much of the lost ground but in 1975 most everything coming from Detroit, particularly the econoboxes, was crap.
“American engineer W. Edwards Deming”
He was the the original Geometric Dimensioning & Tolerancing “guru”.