Fifty years after the first Japanese car coughed its way up the Hollywood Hills, it's hard to imagine a time when the Big Three US automakers sold 95 percent of the cars on the road.
About half of new car sales today are now going to foreign brands and Toyota, which overtook Chrysler last year, is widely expected to knock Ford Motor Co out of the No. 2 spot this year.
Meanwhile, the mighty United Auto Workers (UAW) union, which for generations had helped set the standard for worker benefits and wages in the US, is in the midst of ceding significant ground in the face of competition from non-unionized foreign shops.
"The first wave was a price wave. Then it was a fuel economy wave. Then it became a quality wave. And at every wave the Japanese imports built a position that was very strong," said David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research.
"What has developed since then is the inability [of the Big Three] to compete against well-financed, global companies that had significantly lower costs," he said.
It didn't have to be that way.
The first car Toyota Motor Sales introduced after opening its US operations on Oct. 31, 1957, was a complete flop.
Ford, Chrysler and General Motors Corp were in their golden age, building elegant status symbols which helped cement the US love affair with cars and shape the structure of US cities.
Japanese products were seen as cheap and of poor quality, and Toyota did little to change these perceptions.
Used as taxis on Tokyo's bumpy post-war roads, the Toyopet was uncomfortable, plain and had an engine so weak that "loud, threatening noises radiated from under the hood" when it was driven up steep hills, Toyota admitted in a retrospective.
Toyota had sold just 2,314 Toyopets when it was replaced in 1965 with the Corona, which was designed for US roads and drivers.
The Corona was a hit, pushing Toyota into the number two spot for import cars by 1969. But import sales comprised just 11 percent of the US market and remained dominated by Volkswagen, which sold nearly five times as many cars as Toyota.
It wasn't until the oil crises and economic downturns of the 1970s that the inexpensive, fuel efficient cars produced by Toyota and other Japanese automakers began to pose a serious challenge.
By 1979, the situation was critical in Detroit when Chrysler, on the verge of bankruptcy, had to be bailed out by the federal government with US$1.5 billion in guaranteed loans.
As US plants were shuttered in the face of growing sales of Japanese brands and Japanese investors started buying landmarks like the Rockefeller Center, a strong backlash was growing.
Frustrated auto workers, and even politicians, took sledgehammers to Japanese cars in publicity stunts and private moments of frustration.
But while the Japanese may have been aggressive in pursuing sales, much of the damage done to US automakers was self-inflicted, said Jeremy Anwyl, president of Edmunds.com.
"If you look at the products the Big Three brought out ... you had car after car being introduced that were a disaster after a disaster," he said in a telephone interview.
"You had engines that would break down at just 30,000 miles [48,280km]," he said. "This stuff went on for 15 years before they started turning things around."
Just as the Big Three were finally starting to address their quality and productivity problems, another economic downturn hit in 2000 and then gas prices started to rise again.
Consumers shied away from the gas-guzzling sports utility vehicles whose high margins had subsidized the Big Three's underperforming small cars.
And the market share of US automakers, which had spent much of the 1980s and early 1990s in the mid to low 1970s, dropped to 66 percent in 2000, 55 percent last year, and is now hovering at 50 percent, according to Ward's Auto.
Tens of thousands of autoworkers have lost their jobs as plant after plant was shuttered, devastating scores of midwestern towns.
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