The period from 1973-1983 was known as the "Malaise Era" for US Automakers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaise_era https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaise_era

The period from 1973-1983 was known as the "Malaise Era" for US Automakers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaise_era https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaise_era The issue wasn't mainly labor costs, it was a combination of new emissions regulations and rising gas prices along with US Automakers refusal to adopt fuel injection instead doggedly clinging to ever more complicated iterations of the carburetor (the computer controlled carburetors of the early 1980s with their rats nest of wires and vacuum hoses reached peak Rube Goldberg status). Meanwhile, Bosch introduced fuel injection in 1973 and within a couple of years FI was standard on most European and Japanese cars; US automakers waited a decade to adopt it en masse.