It's a shame that all of you have had such bad experiences with American cars...I have a '96 Chevy Tahoe with over 100,000 miles on it. Nothing but routine maintenance. As a matter of fact, I am going to buy another one. Just don't go to slow in front of me with one of those weenie 4 banger rice grinders...the Tahoe would roll right over you (and probably dump it's huge 25 gallon gas tank on you).
It's not about having some
a priori prejudice against American products, I think. We all want our nation to do well. But be realistic - when I shop for anything, including cars, I look at price and I look at quality. If American products are competitive in those respects, I'll buy them, and if they aren't, I won't. If domestic automakers can consistently make cars of the price and/or quality of their foreign competition, I'll give them a look. But if American automakers can't make cars like that, then they deserve to go out of business. I happen to think they can, but for a long time they didn't have to, so they fell into bad habits.
If we can get cheaper, better cars elsewhere, it is wasteful and inefficient to produce cars here. We live in a world of scarce and limited economic resources, and we should be allocating those resources elsewhere, rather than trying to prevent dinosaurs from going extinct. "Buy American" is nothing more than a restatement of the commandment to "pay no attention to that man behind the curtain", IMO...