I worked in an advanced vehicle design skunkworks at GM Design Staff in the late 1980's (a time when the quality of Japanese cars was a top threat to US car makers). While there I had access to a wide range of top of the line Japanese-domestic-market-only vehicles imported into the US specifically for teardowns just like this, frequently before Japanese buyers could obtain them locally domestically. In those days, it wasn't electric power plants that were the issue, it was (among other things) the density and efficiency and downright beauty with which the engine compartment contents were packed. I still remember standing around an open engine with a bunch of hotshot car guys, all of us in awe at the look of the engine compartment in front of us. There was nothing on the US market packed anywhere near as tightly, yet everything was completely accessible and downright beautiful. In hindsight I strongly suspect this was a sign they started using CAD packing tools long before we did (laser scanning of hand-sculpted car designs was still a few years away in the US, to say nothing of actual CAD-first designs). If the packing was done by hand (as it might well have been) I've genuinely no idea how they managed the complexity of that design task. Sometimes you need to see that someone has completely outclassed you in order to break free and take your own thinking to the next level. So yes, when there are Japanese or German or any other cars that stand out as major design advances, you can be sure Ford and GM and all the other major manufacturers have them in review and teardown the day they start coming off the assembly line.
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I worked in an advanced vehicle design skunkworks at GM Design Staff in the late 1980's (a time when the quality of Japanese cars was a top threat to US car makers). While there I had access to a wide range of top of the line Japanese-domestic-market-only vehicles imported into the US specifically for teardowns just like this, frequently before Japanese buyers could obtain them locally domestically. In those days, it wasn't electric power plants that were the issue, it was (among other things) the density and efficiency and downright beauty with which the engine compartment contents were packed. I still remember standing around an open engine with a bunch of hotshot car guys, all of us in awe at the look of the engine compartment in front of us. There was nothing on the US market packed anywhere near as tightly, yet everything was completely accessible and downright beautiful. In hindsight I strongly suspect this was a sign they started using CAD packing tools long before we did (laser scanning of hand-sculpted car designs was still a few years away in the US, to say nothing of actual CAD-first designs). If the packing was done by hand (as it might well have been) I've genuinely no idea how they managed the complexity of that design task. Sometimes you need to see that someone has completely outclassed you in order to break free and take your own thinking to the next level. So yes, when there are Japanese or German or any other cars that stand out as major design advances, you can be sure Ford and GM and all the other major manufacturers have them in review and teardown the day they start coming off the assembly line.