It's a bit of a stretch to say the displacement of 1990s search engines offers useful context for early American car makers, when the failure mode for a car company involves physical infrastructure and regulations that a website just doesn't have to deal with.
For search engines, the switching costs were practically zero; people just used a different URL. But for cars, you're talking about huge capital for factories and supply chains, and getting safety approvals from bodies like the UK's Vehicle Certification Agency, making market entry and exit a completely different beast.
The weakest link in this analogy is ignoring the immense regulatory and physical barriers that fundamentally altered the competitive landscape for automobiles compared to digital services.