“Why would the consumer pay more for a car that was a piece of sh!t?”
Things looked different back then. Absent a low-cost alternative, consumers would have jumped from one US company to another. Besides, without the illegal dumping, American autos need never have gotten as bad as they did.
“These weren’t Ford Escorts that were produced at that plant — they were Thunderbirds. Did Japanese companies even produce a car that competed for market share with a Thunderbird back then?”
Come on, negative effects on the company at large are negative effects on every model, especially when you’re talking about a niche product like the T-Bird.
The facts simply don’t bear that out. Ford didn’t stop making Thunderbirds. They just stopped making them at that plant because the highly compensated UAW workers couldn’t produce cars with the kind of quality that any normal human being would expect for the price they were paying.