By 1954, Americans could again buy a wide range of vehicles, now that the restrictions on building cars during World War II and the retooling of plants were over.

Wide range, of course, of cars built in the United States.

The fact is that the Big Three automakers – General Motors, Ford and Chrysler – accounted for about three-quarters of all the cars produced in the whole world in the early 1950s. It was a domination that did not seem likely to end.

It did.

The first car I remember my Dad driving was a beige Dodge. Most of his cars, which were given to him by his employer, Firestone, were Chevrolets. He once drove a Studebaker Lark, which he wasn’t crazy about – Studebaker stopped making cars in the mid-’60s. He also had a Chevy Corvair for a few weeks – it was a car that, as a 7-year-old, I could not fit in its back seat.

The Corvair is what some people see as the start of the decline of American automotive dominance. It was an attempt to build a smaller car for people who wanted one – and it was not particularly well thought out.

It was, in fact, “Unsafe at Any Speed,” the title of the book written by attorney and journalist Ralph Nader, who researched lawsuits filed against GM about the Corvair. 

American cars, once thought to be the paragon of the industry, were starting to be seen as poorly made, with constant recalls and safety issues. And as gas prices rose in the 1970s, they were also seen as not economical, often getting less than 10 miles per gallon. “Lemon” and “gas guzzler” entered the vocabulary.

The exact opposite was happening on the other side of the world.

A Japanese company, Toyota, had struggled to find its place in the vehicle industry. It needed a bailout from the Bank of Japan in 1949, but only after management and labor agreed to cost cutting and productivity improvements.

They succeeded. In 1952, Toyota built its first passenger vehicle, the Crown. Six years later, it tried the U.S. market – and failed. 

But it kept coming. Toyota and the other Japanese companies, Honda and Nissan (originally Datsun), found the niche in economical smaller cars. And they focused on quality as the Americans foundered.

By the 1980s, it was an intense battle. The Big Three saw it as a point of pride that Americans should buy cars made in the U.S.A. But more and more Americans just didn’t want them – the Japanese cars were safer and easier on gas.

For a while, the Honda Accord and Ford Taurus battled for supremacy. Then came the Toyota model named for its original vehicle: the Japanese word for crown is Camry.

Meanwhile, across the Sea of Japan, South Korea began to have ideas about building cars. Some businessmen built its first one in 1955, two years after the truce halting the Korean War. Hyundai built its first car twenty years later.

The American auto industry almost died for good in the Great Recession. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama intervened to bail out the industry, and American carmakers have recovered a little of the ground lost to the companies from Japan, South Korea and luxury vehicle makers in Europe.

But it’s somewhat political. On the East and West coasts, non-American cars dominate the roads. In the middle of the country, where the nation’s remaining auto plants are located, GM and Ford hold sway.

My Dad was disappointed when my wife and I started buying Toyotas in the 1990s. Firestone was closely aligned with Ford, but my first two cars were Fords and they were not particularly reliable.

He finally sort of came around with my Highlander, an SUV that was a lot easier to drive and maintain than the clunkers GM was still cranking out.

Dad didn’t live to see me switch to Hyundai in 2018. 

And that’s what led me to this thought: How would you go back to 1954 and explain to anyone – maybe even anyone in Korea – that there would be millions of Hyundais and Kias on American highways in 70 years?

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