Latest sales reports by world's automakers showed that foreign cars outsold domestic brands in the U.S. market for the first time as sales by the Big Three nosedived, the Los Angeles Times reported Thursday.

Trouble in the U.S. housing market has spread to car dealer showrooms, with worrying implications for the broader economy, and Detroit is no longer the carmaker of choice for the majority of Americans, the newspaper said.

Total car and light truck sales in the United States fell 12.3 percent in July. With sales of foreign models off 5 percent from July 2006, the falloff for the Big Three -- General Motors, Ford and Chrysler -- was a much bigger 19 percent.

Foreign cars accounted for almost 52 percent of July sales, although the milestone might not be very meaningful in an industry that is increasingly globalized, industry analysts said.

The "import" tag fits less and less these days as the most of the foreign models sold in the U.S. market are made locally, they said.

Falling home prices and high gasoline prices have dampened overall consumer appetite for car shopping, especially depressing sales of gas-hungry pickups and sport utility vehicles, which the U.S. companies rely on for the bulk of their sales.

For Detroit, the loss of top billing in July was a fall from a lofty perch. U.S. companies made almost every car sold in America 50 years ago.

In 1950s, with Japan and Germany still rebuilding their war-ravaged economies, U.S. carmakers' vision of automotive excellence-- tail fins and powerful V-8 engines -- ruled the marketplace.

But that dominance faded as imports such as the Volkswagen Beetle became a familiar sight on U.S. streets. The shift accelerated in the 1970s, when the first round of oil price shocks suddenly made Japanese cars smart buys for many Americans.

Toyota, Honda and Nissan -- dubbed the Japanese Big Three -- began building cars and trucks in the United States since the early 1980s when import restrictions imposed. Today they produce almost 27 percent of the cars sold in the United States.

And now a new competitor looms across the Pacific as experts said that Chinese carmakers may take shorter-than-expected time to bring their products to the U.S. market.

Peter Morici, an international trade expert at the University of Maryland, said the Japanese and then the Koreans needed years to earn how to make good cars to grab a significant share of the U.S. market.

And "it's not going to take the Chinese that long," he said.