Yes, it helped that I was able to buy high-quality Toyota cars.

Unironically, yes, it did. It didn't necessarily help Detroit specifically for a wide variety of reasons, but it made American car companies up their game and make more competitive vehicles, helping ensure the survival of American companies and offer more and better choices for American car buyers. I'm not a huge fan of the way Ford pivoted away from small good cars to exclusively selling large pickups and SUVs (and the Mustang, I guess), but it still represents Ford's attempt to stay more competitive than they would had to have been without foreign competition.

It helped consumers a lot.

Why is consumerism the metric here, and not general societal health?

Cars are bad, but there are far more people driving a car than working in the automobile industry. The former has a better claim to societal health than the latter.

Cars are not "bad", and there are far more people driving than taking public transportation. Most of them prefer it.

Cars are good in some circumstances, mass transit, in other circumstances. One size does not fit all.

Small, inexpensive cars would also be good in some circumstances, but the US auto industry, for some reason, struggles to offer something as compact as Honda Fit, or at least something as reliable as Toyota Corolla.

Agree with you, it would be nice to have small cheap cars, from my understanding it's two main reasons.

1) The amount of safety requirements that the US (and additionally CA) make the margins too low to sell cheap cars.

2) Most people don't want them and won't buy them (myself included).

Although I have lived in multiple towns where "golf carts" are legal and those were cool.

We wouldn’t have Eminem

Just to be clear, American car manufacturers bear zero responsibility in this scenario?

The US car makers were very much responsible for their demise in 2000s. My question is: did the fierce competition help? Has the "blood reckoning" ever happened? What was the cost of it?

We also need pigouvian taxation to make the $100,000 pickup and SUV crowd suffer, yes.

I'm sorry but the insufferable big city progressives have leaked their way into HN.

Your "need" is a feel good story with 0 chance of ever passing as Federal law, thank god. Pass it in your state if you wish.

Did you, perchance, hear about San Francisco, CA, and the whole "Bay Area"? :)

Yes, the when I was there last year I had a great time seeing the sites, shoplifters, meth/heroin use in the open, shops closing. I'm sure the SUV tax will take care of that.

Contrary to popular belief around here, SF is not a model city of perfect living. How about SF solves its homelessness problem?

That's a misread. The claim is that "big city dwellers" have obviously been there the whole time.