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Well the USA came out of WWII with state of the art industry that didn't get bombed and they didn't have some other country telling them what to do. So obviously they were on top of the auto market for a decade before foreign cars really even became available, and even then it took another 5-10 years to for those foreign cars to be Americanized enough to even be considered by most buyers. Meanwhile domestic automakers were resting on their laurels and not really caring about their cars enough. You know, people were still buying them and all. In 68 and 72 GM was the largest manufacturer of locomotives in the world with a huge order backlog and they were also busy making M16s and tons of other stuff for the military, among many other things. As mentioned earlier, American engineering also had a lot of stuff going on at the time, too.
So it's 1968 and BMW (or Porsche, VW, whoever) has a fun little car that the big 3 really don't intend on competing with. They've certainly got their finger on the pulse of the American car market, a market they built from nothing. For the "auto cognoscenti" it must have been a refreshing break from the DGAF nature of most of the domestics on the market at the time.
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