The fact that one school of thought proposes a different way to measure "Americanness" than another school of thought just reinforces, at least to me, that the definition is anything you want it to be. I agree somewhat in principle with Kogod, but when you look at their matrix:
http://www.american.edu/kogod/autoindex/2015.cfm
You can see that they've plugged subjective numbers in for their categories based on definitions that are absolute.
R&D, for example, gives you 6% if a domestic company, 3% if foreign and assembled in the US, or 1% if foreign and imported. I wager that those are incredibly simplified versions of the truth, and probably don't accurately represent reality on a model-by-model basis. For example, the Odyssey and CR-V both get a "3" for R&D, though I can pretty much guarantee that the Odyssey's "domestic content" for R&D is significantly higher than the CR-V's. The Odyssey was engineered in North American for the North American market -- I'd say that nearly all of its R&D was in North America. The CR-V, in comparison, is a global car and I bet a much lower percentage of its R&D was in North America. Yet, it gets the same simplified score.
I'm not sure I agree with the all-or-nothing profit margin, either (6% if domestic, 0% if foreign). Regardless of the HQ location of the company, profits go to shareholders and profits are invested in assembly plants here in the United States. However, they curiously give Chrysler brands a 3, which isn't allowed per their definition. Either way, Chrysler used to be a 6. I'm not sure there was a point in time during their transition to Fiat where profits were handled significantly differently within Chrysler. Chrysler is still investing in its assembly plants here, it's still paying shareholders in the United States, I'm sure it's still giving money to local charities where their assembly plants and engineering offices are located, etc.
I believe the way they've defined their categories and the way they've defined the values given is far too simplistic. They didn't do any real analysis into how the profit stream at Chrysler, for example, changed after its merger with Fiat. They just dropped them from a 6 in Profit Margin to some imaginary 3, which doesn't really exist according to their definition of the scores.
I guess if this matrix makes sense to you, then go with it. I, however, don't see any real analysis here and, ironically, see a lot of inconsistency in how numbers are given based on a rigid definition (to be able to avoid any real analysis). This is a matrix that anyone with a Wikipedia connection could have done, just looking up locations of assembly locations and headquarters buildings.
