> What's wrong with saying "Japanese cars" today?

Only that it’s a fairly meaningless grouping. When japan first entered the car market in north america there might have been some commonality, but now what characteristics do they share that some american cars don’t have? They’re not even imported a lot of the time.

Given that, it does start to feel tinged with racism if someone insists on grouping things together that don’t really belong together.

As for Chinese LLMs, the term doesn’t “feel” pejorative to me - but i also don’t see a totally clear set of attributes they share. Not all are open-weight. Some are small and can be run on consumer hardware, some are huge. They even have a variety of answers to what happened june 3rd 1989

> now what characteristics do they share that some american cars don’t have?

Typically the answer is "reliability", which is a positive trait, which makes the original callout about negative connotations very odd to me.