Coen said:
DeformedTree said:
And a lot of the US models are never sold elsewhere. Not much purpose for a Ford Raptor in the Netherlands.
Well, we have the taxes in such a way that if you drive around in a tank, you will pay for it... As a consequence less supersized cars and safer traffic. US cars also lagged behind in gas mileage bigtime for a long time. Since gas is about 2.5 times more expensive here.... the calculation becomes different.
Correct, having mechanisms that force people to make more rational decisions helps things a bunch, still, even without, vehicles end up different based on where they go. I wish very much we taxed base on mileage/displacement/engine size/etc. With no constraint, everything grows, thus if you want just a basic vehicle with small efficient engine, and all around practicality, it doesn't exist. Everything must be 300-400HP, power everything, 3 row seating, etc. This is how you get people who commute to their office job in an Ford F450 dully with nearly 500hp/1000ft-lb torque able to tow 30,000lbs and it might get used to move a jet sky 3 times a year, and then they complain with fuel prices go up.
On mileage, what is lost is 1) mileage was often shown using different definitions of a gallon, which made European cars look like they went further because they used a bigger gallon. 2) The biggest thing was emissions, the US went after emissions hard in 1970, long before Europe did this. Mileage was not the focus, emissions was. In Europe the focus was on mileage, not emissions. This sends things in different directions. US had larger engines with a lot of emissions systems. EU would have small turbo engines, these engines make power efficiently, but terrible emissions. When EU started to work on emissions starting in the 80s this started the shift to engines there gets a bit bigger and more US like. At the same time as the US began to look more at mileage after emissions had largely been dealt with, the engines began to get smaller and turbos more common. Today, the EU and US spec engines are very similar and often the same. 2 Places had different focus, with the other working the other focus later, and thus the 2 eventually converged. This is why you no longer see situations where if a car was solid in both regions the biggest EU engine might be the smallest US engine. Similar lines drove US gas engines vs EU diesel engines, US auto trans usage vs EU manual trans usages. Regulations and users started things very different and eventually converged. Globalization has got cars closer to being the same around the world, with far less changes required to bring into the US. Still, crash test aren't the same yet, and countries have conflicting requirements. Dumb laws will keep being issues, the US has the chicken tax from the 60s, so 25% take on imported trucks kills those models, companies tend not to invent a new model built in the US, they just don't bother. Also 25 year import ban prevents people from speaking with their wallet to get the models they want, This law was directly result of Mercedes, people were importing models not sold in the US, people didn't want to deal with Mercedes charging massive markup in the US to keep the illusion of them being luxury cars to US buyers.
People here would love to be able to buy the wonderful cars folks in the EU, Japan, Australia get, but car companies have ensured we can't buy them. Import ban goes away, you would have ships of LR defenders, small hatch backs, unimogs, various basic utility vehicles heading to the US, all the stuff we could never have, or not have in decades, or only have for insane prices. Not long ago the feds seized people's Defenders from their driveways because the importers paperwork had some issues. Someone buys a 25 year old vehicle and has it seized!
NAINA is not a festool thing, it's an everything thing. Big problem of being a large economy, it makes it easy for companies and governments to block importing of stuff because there is enough market for stuff to be unique to the country. Good news is the past few years, suddenly some retailers are starting to sell to those in the US, now you can even buy stuff from Amazon sites outside the US, so a few things get better. In the past year I've had a few things come from other countries, it's kind of a weird special treat that just was not a common thing to happen outside of private party transactions or family mailing stuff.
There are things I very much wish Festool didn't customize for north america, like removing metric markings. If they only sold 220v tools, it would be interesting, folks would adjust like they do with other 220 tools, but would probably be an issue for the portable contractor, so that is a change that makes sense to adapt to a market. Of course their is plenty of global market for 110V tools, (UK jobsites, US, Canada, Japan, various Caribbean and south American countries, North Korea) so it's not as specialized as some might think.
Adapting to countries is a hard thing, sometimes you have too, sometimes it makes sense, and other times folks really wish they didn't change it (cars here are the classic example, folks ask for the European model to be brought to the US, instead we get some ruined version if we get anything). IKEA is an example of doing it right, they try their best to sell the exact same item as the rest of the world gets. But when it comes to their kitchen system, they "had" to adapt it some to work with north american kitchen logic/design.
