How America’s Engines Became Inferior to Japan’s

Coming out of the Second World War, America was the undisputed engine power of the world. It had, after all, built the machines that won it. But somewhere in the decades since, that stopped being true. An assumption took hold. Anything with a Japanese name was better, and above all, the engines. The ones that started. The ones that ran past 200,000 miles, without complaint. Across almost every category, with an engine inside it, the Japanese now dominate. Almost every category. Because there are two engines they never took. One where America still holds its own. One where America remains the undisputed king of the world to this day. I'll come back to those two. One of them will surprise you. Tell me in the comments which you think they are. Keep them in mind. Because the story of how America lost the rest starts with a single devastating list. The list is no secret. Every year, Consumer Reports publishes a ranking of the most dependable car brands in America. And the top of it is overwhelmingly Japanese. Toyota, Lexus, Subaru, Honda. Swapping places at the summit year after year, with the odd German mark breaking into the group. What you will not find up there is an American name. The highest placed American brand sits far down the order, well back from the leaders. To understand how the country that built the that won a world war ended up there, you have to meet the man who built the belief that list demolishes. Harley Earl was six foot four and from 1927 he ran the styling department at General Motors. The first man in any car company handed that job. They made him a vice president in 1940. He stayed until 1958. He was a stylist, not an engineer. And he never designed an engine or made a single engineering call. What he shaped was a posture. That bigger was better. That displacement was a kind of birthright. That American meant supreme. He did not hand the engineers their decisions. He handed a whole industry its swagger and that swagger long outlived him. That does not mean every American engine lost. Two did not. Keep them in mind. That confidence was about to be tested by something it could not style its way out of. At the start of the new decade Washington would hand Detroit a problem with a hard number attached and the way the industry chose to answer it would give the whole game away. In 1970 Congress passed the Clean Air Act and the number inside it was brutal. The hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide pouring out of every American tailpipe had to fall by 90 percent by the 1975 model year. They had five years to remake the internal combustion engine or stop selling it. Detroit's first reaction was not engineering. At Ford Lee Iacocca went to Congress and warned that the standard could shut the American automobile industry down. At General Motors the engineers argued the target was not merely difficult but physically impossible. When the industry finally produced a fix it was a device. The catalytic converter bolted onto the exhaust downstream of the engine. It scrubbed the gas after the fact at the cost of power and price and left the way the fuel actually burned completely untouched. Six thousand miles away Soichiro Honda had no interest in satisfying the regulation. He went after the thing the regulation was pointing at. Honda had set up a dedicated air pollution research group called the AP Lab and aimed it straight at the combustion process. The idea was lean burn stratified charge. A small pre-chamber that lit a rich mixture which in turn lit a far leaner charge in the main cylinder. More complete combustion, less waste leaving the engine at all. They called it CVCC and it needed no converter. In October 1972 Honda announced the CVCC at a press conference at the Akasaka Prince Hotel in Tokyo. The remarkable part was buried in the technical detail. In testing the engine already met the 1975 American standard. The Environmental Protection Agency invited Honda to prove it at the federal labs in Ann Arbor Michigan. They ran the tests and it passed two years ahead of Detroit's deadline and on a fraction of Detroit's budget. Understand what that meant. A Japanese company had solved ahead of schedule the precise problem General Motors engineers had called physically impossible and it had done so by rebuilding the way the fuel burned not by bolting a filter to the tailpipe. The rest of the industry read the result clearly enough. Toyota licensed the technology from Honda. Ford and Chrysler followed. General Motors alone held out. Its chairman still calling the breakthrough a toy. Certain his own engineers knew better. Then Honda did something close to provocation. In the autumn of 1973 its engineers took a 1973 Chevrolet Impala a 350 cubic inch GM V8. Exactly the kind of big American engine GM said would never benefit from any of this. Fitted it with the CVCC system and sent it to the EPA. It passed with no catalytic converter and horsepower unchanged at 160. It was not a flawless victory and the honest version is the better one. On that Impala the carbon monoxide and the hydrocarbons fell away but the one pollutant CVCC did not touch was nitrogen oxide and as the emissions laws kept tightening even Honda's engine would eventually need a catalyst of its own. Yet on a big American V8 with no converter at all Honda had just done the thing GM swore could not be done. On GM's own engine. In GM's own country. Picture the federal test cell at Ann Arbor. The Impala strapped to the rollers. The engine warming. That sharp catalytic cooked smell of thinning toward nothing as the CVCC did its work. The analyzer needles for carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons sinking toward a line Detroit had sworn could not be reached. Then picture the rooms back in Michigan where those numbers were read aloud and the particular silence that falls when a room of confident men watches a certainty die. When I went through the EPA submission documents I had to check the date twice. The engine met the 1975 standard in 1972. GM's engineers had put their names to the claim that this was impossible. Honda had not just done it. Honda had done it on a Chevrolet and the paperwork proving it sat in a United States government file the whole time. And this is the point Detroit kept missing. The CVCC was no lucky improvisation. It was a method. 17 years later the same discipline produced VTEC on the 1989 Honda Integra XSY. Variable valve timing that delivered more power and more efficiency at once. Neither traded for the other. The CVCC was a moment. The thing underneath it was permanent. Detroit filed the whole humiliation under one comforting heading. Cars are different. The engine in a hundred million American garages. The one with the pull cord. The one that made the Saturday morning sound. That was not a car. That was a different world with different rules. Where Detroit's logic still held. Or so the industry told itself. You know the sound before I describe it. The grip of the pull cord. The resistance. The first dry cough as it almost catches. The second pull. And then that flat steady drone that meant the lawn was about to get done. For most of the 20th century that sound came from one company. Griggs and Stratton founded in Milwaukee in 1908 by Stephen Briggs and Harold Stratton built the engine bolted to nearly every American mower generator and garden tool there was. If you are old enough that engine is somewhere in your memory. A Saturday morning. A father or a grandfather. A machine that always eventually caught. By the time Frederick Stratton Jr. ran it Briggs and Stratton was less a company than a fixture. He was a cost man. Tight margins. Long supply contracts. The kind of operator who knew to the scent what each engine cost to build. His instinct was the instinct of every leader who has been the default too long. When you are the thing everyone buys by reflex you protect the reflex. You do not spend money building the thing that might replace it. In 1983 Honda launched the GX series. It was a commercial engine. Overhead valve. Nearly unkillable. The sort of thing that started cold on the first pull and kept starting. The men who noticed first were the ones who could least afford not to. The landscaping crews. The rental yards. The contractors running engines eight hours a day. For whom a single no start meant a lost morning. They switched for one reason only. The Honda worked every single time. Stratton read the GX the way a cost man reads everything. A premium product priced above what the ordinary homeowner would pay. No real threat to the volume business. He was watching the wrong number. He was guarding a margin structure a century in the making and never quite saw that the consumer tier always follows the professional tier down the same road. A few years behind. It followed. The professionals went first. The homeowners after them. And the volume that had defined the company for 100 years began to thin. Debt piled up through acquisitions and restructuring. On the 20th of July 2020 Briggs and Stratton filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It was the default engine of the American Saturday in court. In fairness Honda only opened the wound. Debt and the Covid shutdown delivered the blow. And Briggs still builds engines today. The company survived. The default did not. If you grew up with that sound and most of you watching this did. Drop me a comment. I'd like to know whether you've still got one running out in the shed. The pattern did not stop at the garden gate. By the time it owned the American lawn it was already out on the American lake. At its peak Outboard Marine Corporation held roughly a third of the entire world outboard market. Its two brands were the names on every dock and tackle shop wall in America. Johnson and Evinrude. The two stroke roar of those motors was the sound of the American lake the way the Briggs drone was the sound of the American lawn. Honda came early in 1964 with the GB30. Its first four stroke outboard. Yamaha followed. Then Suzuki with the same pitch they made everywhere. Cleaner, quieter, longer lived. OMC's engineers were neither fools nor blind. They saw exactly what was coming up the lake. The only question was how to answer it. This part still reads as a tragedy because the company saw the threat clearly and chose wrong anyway. Rather than build a four stroke to meet the Japanese head-on, OMC bet nearly everything on the fished. A direct injection two stroke meant to out clean the four strokes while keeping the brute two-stroke power. Around 1997 the leadership pushed it to market before the engineering was settled. The fished misfired and I mean that literally. Soot built up where it never should and powerheads failed in the field. Warranty claims came in faster than the dealers could absorb and relationships built over decades came apart in two product cycles. On the 22nd of December 2000, OMC filed for bankruptcy. That February, Johnson and Evinrude, those names off every dock in America, were sold to Bombardier of Canada. Not even to Japan, the Japanese had no need to buy what they had already beaten on the water. And here is the part that carries the point. Mercury Marine, the other great American name on the water, did not die and the reason is the whole point. Mercury conceded the argument, abandoned the two-stroke fight and built four strokes exactly as the Japanese had. The American firm that followed Japan survived. The American firm that tried to out clever Japan with the fished is gone. Either way the terms everyone now builds to were written in Japan. If you ran a Johnson or an Evinrude, tell me below which one and whether it ever once let you down. From the lake the pattern moved inland onto the concrete floor of every warehouse in the country. And the next category carried a weight the others did not. Because here America did more than compete. America invented the thing outright. The forklift and then watched it walk away. The inventor has a name. Eugene B Clark in Buchanan, Michigan built the truck tractor in 1917. It was the first internal combustion industrial truck the world had seen. For half a century Clark Equipment simply owned the warehouse floor on the strength of that one machine and the Toyota sold its first forklift in the United States in 1967. Komatsu came and Nissan came in the same era with the approach that had worked in every other category. More reliable, cheaper to own across a working life. Nobody buys a forklift for the thrill of it. You buy it to run 12 hours a day and not break. On that single unglamorous measure the Japanese machines did the job better. Clark's share of the market it had created collapsed. By the early 2000s Toyota had become the number one forklift maker on earth and it has held that position ever since. The machine America invented is now by default Japanese. History Yale is still American, still building lift trucks today so this was a loss of the crown rather than the company. But losing the crown you forged yourself is its own particular humiliation. Four categories, four losses. By now the pattern looked finished, four names on a list whose shape you could already guess. What made the fifth land differently was that it confirmed the pattern in the one place that should have been immune, under the most American paint there is. That paint is John Deere. For the longest time no name looked more untouchable, less a brand than a piece of the country itself. William Hewitt ran the company from 1955 to 1982 at the height of its powers. He commissioned the Eero Saarinen headquarters at Moline, glass and steel and quiet confidence and launched the 1960 new generation of power tractors that turned a heartland maker into a global one. Then he handed the company to his successor at its peak. In the same year the worst agricultural recession since the great depression came down on American farming like a weather front. What came down was the worst farm economy in half a century. Across the Midwest land that the same families had worked for generations went under the hammer and the farm auction became a fixture of the rural calendar. It landed on Deere's books in the simplest way imaginable. The orders stopped. The man who caught it was Robert Hanson, the first non-family chief executive in Deere's history in charge from 1982 to around 1990. He did not inherit a growth story. He inherited a cost crisis. Farm incomes were collapsing. Equipment sales cratering and every decision narrowed to one question. What do you protect? His answer was the core, the big row crop tractors, the combines, the high horsepower machinery the American farmer who feeds people cannot do without. So he gave ground at the edges. In the compact segment the sub 50 horsepower machines for small farms, estates and municipalities, Deere began fitting diesel engines built by Yanmar in Japan. There were the 750, the 850, the 950, the 1050. The most American brand in existence running Japanese iron beneath the green paint. Hanson's logic held up on paper. The compact end was not Deere's real market. The Yanmar engines were cheap and reliable and the badge still read John Deere. What strikes me every time I go back to this is that Deere did not hide it. The Yanmar provenance is right there in the spec sheets and the service manuals for anyone who cared to look. Hanson had simply calculated that the compact buyer would not notice or not mind and he was probably right. What he had not reckoned on was that someone else was reading the same gap in the market. Kubota had noticed. And this is where the two halves click together because they are not separate facts. When Deere bolted Yanmar engines under its own hoods, that was the Japanese threat itself, stated out loud. At the small diesel end, the best engine had simply become a Japanese engine and Deere knew it well enough to buy one rather than build its own. That was the engineering defeat. Kubota was the market defeat. It had landed in America in 1969 with a 21 horsepower compact aimed at a gap Deere never bothered to defend, took that ground through the 1980s and kept it. Today Kubota is the dominant compact tractor brand in the world, a segment that by every right of history should have been John Deere's to lose. There is a particular small heartbreak in that image. The deep Deere green, the leaping Deere in the badge, a livery that meant American soil and American labor for a century and beneath it, bolted into the frame, an engine machined on the other side of the world. Nobody had lied. Nobody had cut a corner. The most American brand there was had simply run the numbers and decided that, at the small end, American iron was no longer worth the premium. This is exactly the kind of detail that vanishes if no one writes it down. A provenance buried in a manual. A quiet decision nobody announced. If you want more of these stories kept on the record, the machines and the men that were let go without a word, subscribe and stay with the channel. It's the one thing that tells me to keep going back into the archives for the next one. Now, back to the green and to the one piece of ground Deere never surrendered. Understand the limit of it though. Large agriculture, the high horsepower tractors, the combines, the machinery that brings in a national harvest, stayed American-led and stays so today. Deere still rules the ground that matters most. The breach was at the compact end, in the small diesels. The heartland held its centre, even as its perimeter gave way. Five categories. Five losses, whole or partial. The point where the two survivors I promised at the start begin to look impossible to defend. They are not. The losing is about to stop. But before I can name the two America kept, there is one machine I have to be honest about. Because it does not fit the story I have been telling at all. Look, that machine is the motorcycle. And here, for once, the engine was never the culprit. Harley Davidson had been bought by AMF in 1969 and by the early 1980s its grip on the big bike market had collapsed. Its share of the super heavyweight class fell from over three quarters in 1973 to barely 30% by 1980, with Japanese machines taking the rest. So let me be plain, this is not one of America's two surviving crowns. Japan took the heavyweight motorcycle and most of it. In 1981 a Harley engineer named Vaughn Beals, who loved the thing enough to wager his own future on it, led a group of 13 executives in an 80 million dollar leveraged buyout to claw the company back from AMF. What he found was an engine that was sound. The Evolution motor was not the failure. The AMF era around it was. The build quality, the pricing, and a management that ran an American institution like one more product line on a spreadsheet. In 1983 a tariff came down 45% in its first year on Japanese motorcycles, over 700 cubic centimeters, on a sliding scale across five years. Signed by President Reagan. That is the fact. The argument about it I leave to you. So Harley belongs here not as a victory but as a warning against my own thesis. Because here the engine was innocent. And that sharpens the real question rather than blunting it. The contest was never simply which country built the better engine. It was whether the two countries were ever building for the same thing at all. And that answer waits in the two engines that genuinely were never taken. This is the engine you have heard 10,000 times and never once looked at. The heavy on-highway diesel hauling 80,000 pounds across a dark continent at two in the morning. Detroit Diesel had built it since 1938 when it began life as a division of General Motors. Its two-stroke series 71 motors powered allied vehicles through the Second World War and American highways for decades after. Loud enough that drivers christened them the Screamin' Jimmies. For a generation that two-stroke wail was simply the sound of freight moving, of a country supplying itself. By the early 1980s the picture had turned grim. General Motors was bleeding money and the old two-strokes could not be made to meet the tightening emissions limits. Detroit Diesel's share of the on-highway market fell to three percent. By any ordinary reading the business was finished. Then in 1987 came the series 60. The first heavy-duty diesel in the world built around fully integrated electronic engine management, a computer governing the entire combustion event. It was a four-stroke designed for overhaul intervals of 500,000 miles, later pushed to three-quarters of a million. It was a different idea of what a truck engine could even be and the drivers noticed first the way the landscapers had noticed the Honda. It ran and kept running past distances that used to mean a tear down. What turned a good engine into a comeback was Roger Penske. On the 1st of January 1988 a joint venture between Penske's company and General Motors created Detroit Diesel Corporation with Penske holding 60 percent. He brought the factory the same thing he brought to a pit lane, obsessive precision and a sales and service operation that actually worked. By October 1993 market share had climbed from that desperate three percent to 33 percent. An engine maker the market had left for dead had taken back a third of its own country's highways in six years. That is not the arc of an industry in terminal decline and the Japanese who beat America almost everywhere else never took this one. Hino, Isuzu and Mitsubishi Fuso are commercial truck giants worldwide. On the American heavy long haul they never took the crown. Detroit held its ground and Detroit Diesel was never the whole of that ground. The larger American story sits in Columbus, Indiana in a company founded in 1919 by a self-taught mechanic named Klessie Cummins, among the first men to put a diesel engine into an American truck. Cummins built its name on motors that ran and ran, offered the industry's hundred thousand mile warranty and became the diesel so trusted that Dodge built its heavy pickups around it. More than a century on Cummins is still American, still independent, still in that same Indiana town, turning over some 34 billion dollars a year. The Japanese engine giants have never dislodged it. There is something worth naming about how this ground was held on brute terms, not Japanese ones. These engines win by being worked half to death and refusing to quit. Their endurance is the endurance of survival under crushing load and it is a different kind of excellence entirely, America's kind. Detroit Diesel itself did eventually lose its independence, sold in 2000 to Daimler Chrysler, that is to say to Germany. I will not pretend that does not count. Losing a company to a European giant is still a company lost. Notice what it does not touch though. Japan never took the American heavy on highway diesel, not the market and not the engine hauling the freight at two in the morning. Cummins is still independent and still American. The flag over one company changed, the thing this whole story turns on did not. Holding a line is one kind of achievement. There is one engine where America never had to hold a line at all because nobody ever pushed it off the top. It rained, it rains still. In 1952 an engineer named Ed Cole moved to Chevrolet. Carrying a motto he liked to repeat, kick the hell out of the status quo. In 1955 his team gave America the small block V8, 265 cubic inches, 162 horsepower in base trim. Light, compact, over square, deliberately unfinished, a starting point, not a destination. What Cole started American engineers spent seven decades refining. The LS family, the Ford Coyote, the Dodge Hemi, each generation more powerful than the last and somehow with more character. Listen to one at full throttle and you hear the whole argument. A deep, uneven, big displacement bellow. No four-cylinder was ever built to make. And here is the proof the V8 still rules. And it is not an American boast. It is the verdict of the global aftermarket, the most pitiless judges of an engine there are. When a builder anywhere on earth wants serious power cheaply and reliably, without drama, the engine they reach for is the American small block. A major American magazine flatly called the LS the de facto engine swap. Suggestion for adding power to almost anything. And the cars people choose to drop it into include the most worshipped sports cars Japan ever made. Think about what that means. The Toyota Supra and its two JZ. The Nissan Skyline and its RB26. Engines the whole world venerates as masterpieces of precision. And there is a deep decades old culture of builders pulling them out of those very cars and bolting in a small block Chevrolet. Because when the goal is brute, dependable power, nothing answers better. The most celebrated machines Japan ever built are all over the world treated as ideal bodies for an American engine. When I came across the scale of this, I had to stop and sit with it. Here is a country that out-engineered America on reliability in category after category. And yet the engine the world reaches for when it simply wants power. The engine even the finest Japanese chassis so often end up carrying is American. The Japanese engines are not the lesser machines here. They are plainly brilliant. But for one specific job, raw indestructible power. Nothing has ever beaten the American V8. That is not a footnote in a technical argument. It is a crown and the world keeps reaching for it. Now notice what the two survivors actually share. Both are engines built for extremity, asked to do more than should be reasonable and to keep doing it. The diesel's job is to drag 80,000 pounds across a continent and survive half a million miles of the doing. The V8's job is to deliver power and noise and feel that nothing else on earth quite matches. And that points to the real distinction. Durability was never the dividing line. The heavy diesel outlasts almost anything Japan makes. The line runs through purpose. Japan won the engine you are meant to forget you own. Efficient. Untroublesome. Quietly outliving its owner. America held the engine you could never forget. The one defined by sheer capability. Whether that meant brute endurance under load or brute power for its own sake. Two different answers to one question. What is an engine actually for? Japan's answer was to vanish into faultless effortless service and on that question Japan won almost everywhere, fairly and completely. America's answer was to be capable past all reason. And in the two arenas where that was the only thing that mattered. America still rules and the world still comes here to settle it. Those are the two Japan never took. One of you named the first at the very start. The great American V8. Alive and reigning. The other tends to catch people off guard. The heavy diesel. Hammering up the interstate through the dark. Carrying the country's freight while the country sleeps. America did not lose because it forgot how to build an engine. It lost the engines you are meant to forget you own. The quiet ones. The efficient ones that simply start. And most of them Japan won fair. Yet the two built to be impossible to forget are kept. The diesel still hauls the freight through the dark. The V8 still makes the only noise on earth like it. Those two Japan never took. And if you want the whole of that story, not the engineers in the AP lab this time. But the single Japanese car that took America by storm. It is already sitting on this channel. Go and watch it next. I'll see you over there.