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"Great companies continuously restructure to change with the times and to anticipate the future," Casesa said. "There isn't time for these [American] companies to turn themselves around [if] they only have two or three months of cash left."

The lessons are not lost on American automakers.

Ford is selling its half-billion-dollar stake in Mazda, and GM is cutting back on everything from the millions it spends on sports sponsorships to office supplies.

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The American companies, too, are now building hybrids and scaling back on pay and benefits.

But some critics have said that to survive, American factories and work forces may need to be restructured to compete with the Japanese model.

At the Honda plant, one worker suggested that unlike Detroit, Honda and other foreign competitors are building fuel-efficient cars that people need today. The Civic is one of the top-selling cars in the United States.

In places like San Antonio, Georgetown, Ky., and West Point, Ga., 15 foreign-owned assembly plants and dozens of supporting factories have been built in the United States. Most of them are in southern states without auto union traditions, and like Indiana's new Honda plant, they are designed for flexibility.

"Asian automakers have a famously flexible and efficient production system," Casesa said. "They have very few job classifications in the plant, so they can employ fewer people to make the same number of cars that Detroit makes.

"They can move people from station to station and job to job," he said. "And they've also designed their assembly lines to build multiple products on the same line."