American Cars

I live in Michigan and my father owns a business that supplies to the automotive industry, so he's always bought from the Big Three[0]. Though I was really young, in the 80s, buying a Toyota or another foreign vehicle and parking in my part of Michigan had a high probability of coming back to your car and finding a nice, long, keying had taken place. It's rare now, but it's hard to forget and when GM/Chrysler were in crisis a few years ago, there was an uptick in that behavior.

Infotainment

Provided you have one from 2013 or later. Otherwise you get a really nice looking screen that won't fscking pair with your Android (or disconnects) 30% of the time.

Reliability/Ford

They do care about reliability (and the Ford Fusion was in that list). I've owned only American cars and with the exception of a Chrysler that was effectively a lemon, I've not had any that experienced expensive repairs over 8 different vehicles (anecdote, yes). The issue is that reliability has a cost and the Big Three have a unique cost not shared by the foreign manufacturers -- the UAW[1]. I think the number I read was $1,500[2] would be saved if the vehicles were built in a non-union plant. That has to come from somewhere. I think in more recent model years, though, the quality has improved due to competition from foreign brands breaking even the most die-hard "Buy American" people. The number of foreign non-luxury vehicles on the road in SE Michigan is way higher than I've seen it in my lifetime. It's still a minority, here, but if Michiganians are increasingly buying foreign, that's a wake-up call for the big 3.

You're dead on, though. At current count of family and friends, I have talked to eight people who switched to Honda or Toyota from Ford or GM. All of them cited a car with multiple quality issues as the reason they switched. The more interesting part for me was that all of them were on leases where their time of ownership put them within the warranty period for all repairs -- they didn't have to pay for any of them! But where we live, being without a car leaves you forced to rent (in one case for almost a month). Public transportation is limited to a really lousy bus service that might or might not arrive within an hour of the posted scheduled time (if at all) and require several transfers to get to your destination, making a 30 minute drive take ... an average Thursday by bus.

A fundamental change has to take place at the autos -- one with a focus purely on quality of the product. The US market vehicles, when I last purchased, offered few with warranties over 40,000 miles. They have a reputation for producing sub-par vehicles. To fix it, they'd need to do something extreme. Build a car with a hyper-focus on reliability and toss a 150,000 mile 10 year comprehensive warranty on it[3] (if it's built well, it'll cost them no more than it does today). If they take it to that extreme, they'll be believed by the industry press and the buyer.

[0] When people say "Buying American" they're usually referring to these guys, which is another way of saying UAW built cars. There's no car that I'm aware of that is built 100% in America with American parts and some vehicles from foreign brands have a larger percentage built in the United States (by non-union plants usually located in the South) than the equivalent in their categories from the big three.

[1] No, I'm not a union fan, but I also do not work in the automotive industry so, in general, I don't care.

[2] I don't have the exact number and I couldn't find it from a quick Google search. The counter to this is always "the foreign cars have import costs!" which is true, but so do the American brands (see point [0]) and in a lot of cases, the foreign brands offset that cost by assembling in American plants ... in the South ... that are non-union (and the workers actively resist attempts at unionizing them for whatever reason).

[3] When I purchased my Fusion, I got one with, literally, all the options. I was taken to what I refer to as the "Hard Sell Room" and explained the options for an (unbelievably expensive) Extended Warranty. The worst salesman ever said "You have this, that and the other feature. This one costs $500 to repair, this one costs $700 to repair" and went on before I cut him off with "So what you're telling me is that your cars are unreliable and I need to buy a separate insurance policy because if any of these shiny features fail, I'm going to own a rock with wheels". I, seriously, almost walked out of the dealership. I'm at 100,000 miles with no service required beyond routine maintenance.