This is a terrible example to use in an article of this sort -- and the New York Times ought to know this better than anyone simply because they can see first-hand evidence of it right outside their offices in Manhattan.
Any U.S. company that decided to manufacture subway cars would probably be out of business in a hurry, since there haven't been too many new subways built in this country in the last few decades -- and the number of new subway cars purchased for replacement by existing transit agencies is far too small to establish the economies of scale needed for a traditional assemby-line manufacturing operation.
This is a terrible example to use in an article of this sort -- and the New York Times ought to know this better than anyone simply because they can see first-hand evidence of it right outside their offices in Manhattan.
Uh, for 8 million people the NYT is their hometown paper and those people ride the crappy imported subways.