We already know that established American cars are crap

There was a period, in the 70s/80s, when they were absolute crap. And then Japan started building non-crap cars, so Americans actually had to compete. For a brief, beautiful decade in between '98 and '08, you could get a Ford Focus for under $20k and it would drive 150k miles doing 50+mpg and almost never break.

Then Toyota started cheaping out and Ford got extra slack, and it was a race to the bottom again.