“what the U.S. auto industry was dealing with back in the 1970s and 1980s. Their union workers turned out crap cars but they couldn’t be fired.”
Don’t forget that the Japanese government was subsidizing Japanese auto makers so they could dump their cars on the US market below cost.
As crappy as American cars were back then, they’d have been more competitive without the full power of the Japanese government arrayed against them.
Foreign subsidies are no excuse for poor workmanship. I grew up not far from a Ford plant that was closed in the early 1980s because it had the worst record for producing defective cars of any plant in the company. That’s a pathetic indictment of the work force there, and it had nothing to do with Japanese competition.