Drive through any neighbourhood in an urban or suburban area and the driveway's tell the story. The people buying the foreign vehicles are the upper middle class. Those earning (families) about $80,000 or more per year. Their driveways inevitably have Toyotas, Nissans, Acuras, BMWs and Hondas in them. Why? Because they buy what their friends buy because it is expected of them. The rich have always bought foreign cars, but they don't represent enough of a percentage of the public to do any harm to American car makers. However, someone who at one time would have been buying a Lincoln is now buying a mid-level BMW. The idea would not even occur to them to buy the Lincoln. In rural areas, you tend to see far more American cars as a percentage of the cars on the road, but it is the urbanites who control the market and they have shifted to the foreign. It has gone beyond the idea of higher quality; If you are upper middle class and buy a American car, you are practically ostracized by your peers. The sad thing is, quality, what first made people switch over, is now a secondary reason. Quality in all cars (for the most part) is now excellent. You don't even have to do maintenance except to change the oil in your car. So given that, and the fact that foreign cars cost a mint when they do need repairs, why do Americans of a certain class buy them? Peer pressure, pure and simple. Their young buy "tuners" or 4-cylinder rice mobiles, so it begins at a very early age. The only bright spot in the equation is that 4x4s and pickup trucks which (of course) the Americans pioneered as popular vehicles are selling in most brands, but the foreigners are taking more of that market too. However, fuel costs could drive Americans more into the camp of the foreign trucks because the foreign move to powerful v8 engines has been slow in coming. They still mostly have 6's and their "economy" might be used as a selling point to take more market share from American vehicles. Given the importance of the auto industry in the economic scheme of things, and now that the jobs of some upper middle classers (computer programmers, etc) have started moving offshore like the production jobs have done for years, I wonder why some Americans do whatever they can to AVOID buying domestic vehicles? Yes, I know some of them are built here; So what? Buying them still undermines U.S. industry. All so the upper mids can have that Sonoma or Maxima parked on their freshly coated driveways.
-Rich