3 ms·
> Look at the European market: manual gears everywhere. Look at the UK, South African and Autraslian market: the car is inversed, with the wheel on the right.
by AmericanChopper 6y ago
> Look at the European market: manual gears everywhere. Look at the UK, South African and Autraslian market: the car is inversed, with the wheel on the right.
These aren’t really great examples of marketing to a niche. Automatic transmissions cost more money, so manuals are more popular than they are in the US in every country that has less disposable income than the US. The primary reason it’s so easy to get a left hand drive car in Australia is because the UK and Japan drive on the left.
- fomine3 6y ago> in every country that has less disposable income than the US So you argue almost all country prefer manuals? It's not true at least in Japan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_capita_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...
- AmericanChopper 6y agoI’m saying it’s quite strongly correlated. From memory the difference in price was a few thousand dollars between manual and automatic. For some consumers that price difference is enough to override other preferences. Some markets have more of those consumers than others, to the extent that an automatic car would be a somewhat uncommon luxury item in a lot of places.