First, a lot of countries have protectionist trade policies but few can make cars like Japan. They have an excellent engineering culture. Second, who cares if

First, a lot of countries have protectionist trade policies but few can make cars like Japan. They have an excellent engineering culture. Second, who cares if they had favorable policies during the mid 1900's - they were also rebuilding after a nuclear war. We had a massive head-start in auto engineering back in the 1960's and then we stopped trying. They're the tortoise and we're the hare. Look at our race series, what NASCAR tech is trickling down to modern cars? F1's out there with hybrid systems and energy recovery devices on the absolute bleeding edge of technology and NASCAR has only recently lifted their 55 year ban on fuel injection. It's laughable. Technology shouldn't go from foreign racing circuits, to Japanese and German family sedans, to American family sedans, and then finally to our race cars. The notion that a auto-racing is used to fund R&D is apparently lost on us. To put it bluntly we have nobody to blame but ourselves and we're lucky to have somebody like Elon Musk come along.