The trend of the last few years, in the auto mfg'ing area, has been to focus on quality.
In the free market, anyone can become rich quick by selling products for less money than their direct competition does, however this lends itself to cutting corners to remain competitive. The corner cutters will not remain rich because we tend to be creatures of habit, and when we purchase a product that shows it's flaws in quality, we tend to steer off of that product in the future....even if the product quality improves, we tend to remember how it was before and stay away from it. We also recommend others to steer clear as well. The answer to that problem is to build with quality and workmanship in mind, and the fruits of that labor will eventually come to reality.
I get the opportunity to see the inside workings of different auto operations. Generally speaking, the Japanese companies tend to not enter into agreements with the UAW and other organizing unions. Amercian auto mfg's are neck deep into the union agreements.
As far as tolerences and quality being better in the Japanese shop, I don't buy that at all. The top sellers of any auto builder are built to rigid specifications and quality control checks. In fact, as I stated above, quality is pretty much the main focus with all of them.
What does seperate the foriegn auto mfg's from one another is the tooling and maintenance.
When a big three auto maker hires a maintenance electrician, for an example, they normally hire directly from the local union halls. They will employ folks who have already gone through a valid apprenticeship program with their original union. The new hires usually are already completely skilled in their area. I've seen maintenance men hired that were general formen or superintendants with their previous employer. Having a skilled maintenance force is where much of the bottom line is created.
Non-union mfg's tend to hire maintenance folks who may not be trained through a union apprecticship program. That's not to say they don't get any good people, they do. But the ratio of highly skilled vs mediocre is quite a bit higher in the non-union shops. (why would a skilled union worker work for $18.50 an hour at Toyota when he can get hired for $30 at Ford?)
When tooling in a production process goes down, the end of profits begin. With a mediocre maintenance force, downtime can be considerably more than if it were being addressed by the higher skilled folks. This is where many of the auto mfg's tend to be miles ahead of the others. (When the Super Duty truck line stops running, Ford loses ~$10-15,000 per MINUTE profit...this profit is AFTER all the bills have been paid....ie. Stockholders money)
I think that most any vehicle we buy in the US is going to have decent quality. The market demands that. The person who bolts up the dash in the union shop will be the same person bolting up the dash in the non-union shop, the difference between the two shops is the maintenance force.
Yes, it costs Ford, GM, Crysler more money to employ the skilled folks that they do, however they tend to be "on-line" more than their competition.
Both ways of doing business seems to be successful. And we never see this situation as the consumers. All we see is sticker price and eventually, the quality. So, don't think that an inflated price of a vehicle is due to better quality or parts, it probably aint so.
All of the above deals with auto makers here at home. The foreign shops that are opening up, like in Mexico, have a whole different set of things to worry about. For one....they have a hard time keeping the quality factor up. I mean, how much effort and skill does a 5 dollar a day person put out? How much ability do they have? They live in a different world and this is reflected in their work. There is good reason why some auto plants in Mexico only export the product to other third world-ish places.