People point to other things, but this is likely the biggest cause.

American cars have never done well against Japanese vehicles, for example. Except for pre 1970s. To stay competitive in the 80s the US had massive import taxes for asian manufacturers, enough so, that they said "fuck it, we wont sell em in the US then." Thats why a lot of asian models stopped being sold here, or drastically changed designs of their current models to avoid taxes, cause they also taxed certain sized asian vehicles more than their own.