As a postscript to Matt Zeitlin's righteous harangue on inferior American automobiles, I was struck by how small the cars in Brazil were. At one point, I notice a massive car parked on the road only to discover the monster was a Toyota Corolla. And when I got into it -- it was my uncle's Corolla -- it felt like a Bentley.
When everyone else's car is tiny, you don't need a very big car to feel like you're in luxury. Of course, in America, what would happen next is that everyone would get Corollas, leaving some to buy Camrys, at least until Camrys became common, so we'd move onto Explorers, and so on, and so forth, till you have the Hummer. Brazil has prevented that arms race through the novel strategy of keeping everyone too poor to buy bigger cars, which, while effective, probably wouldn't fly here in the States.
