mergrogh

An example. You drive pickups with 10 cylinder motors which drink 20-30 liters of gas for 100km (sorry for the metric system;)
In Germany the usual pickup would have a diesel motor drinking *at maximum* 15 liters of diesel. And most people just don't ride pickups cause they are too big ;-)

Even german cars (volkswagen, audi, bmw, benz) are sold with bigger motors in the US.. you need bigger motors for your old-school automatic transmissions. In germany only very few people like automatic transmissions, it's something for people who cannot drive ;-) And it leads to higher gas consumption. A bit different are the new automatic gears like audi's tiptronic..

So you end up with a car that has.. let me guess.. 200 horse powers and automatic transmission, which is able to accelerate like a 75 hp car with manual transmission using half the gasoline..

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