Backing the big gas guzzlers has definitely hurt the U.S. auto industry again when fuel prices spiked, but by some measures, the quality gap may finally be closing, and was no smaller back in the 1990s when big vehicles were hugely profitable and selling like gangbusters.

A lot of the quality gap stems from attempts to cut non-labor costs such as materials in order to make up for gaps in labor costs incurreed by U.S. manufacturers and foreign competitors (even compared to the non-union Toyota and Honda factories in the U.S.). I've seen estimates that anywhere from $1000+ of the price tag on each current GM car goes to pay for retiree benefits for workers who haven't built a car in years (unless they happen to restore old cars as a hobby in their retirement), and that union work rules have resulted in differentials of hundreds of labor hours required for GM/Ford to build cars in comparable classes to Toyota/Honda. With Japanese manufacturers getting around some amount of tarrifs by assembling many models in U.S. facilities (my old Tacoma was built in Freemont, CA, and even contained a significant percentage of U.S.-made parts), that means the GM/Ford have to cut thousands of dollars out of the cost of making their cars in some aspect other than labor in order to be competitive (and have faced the additional disadvantage of a customer base which is generally willing to pay more for the competitor's product since they consider it to be worth more due to higher quality). It probably also doesn't help the end product quality to have UAW generally shielding workers from accountability for the quality of their work, either.