Hah! And I have completely the opposite experience - with the exception of modern American cars of course (still miss my 90s Chrysler Saratoga!) Europe is very

Hah! And I have completely the opposite experience - with the exception of modern American cars of course (still miss my 90s Chrysler Saratoga!) Europe is very often about the looks and the function is secondary. The most recent example - Vaillant vs Honeywell heating controllers. Vaillant looks fancy with decorative, smoothly flowing elements, knobs and fancy backlight, and the Honeywell unit is, well, spartan: big LCD letters, primitive graphics. Vaillant is crazy - it is too slow to react on temperature changes, the interface is just horrible: imagine no escape or back button - you just have to idle a minute to go back to the "main screen." It takes 30 seconds or so to connect wirelessly to the boiler, sometimes it fails or even freezes and requires a reset, and I can go on forever. I hate the fucking thing. Honeywell... Well it just works.