ex. Why does Japan give the USA the naturally aspirated and sometime lesser quality compared to their market. Why not share it’s essentially the same car? this may be stupid.
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Especially for Japanese designed cars, the US model must be designed to be left hand drive (Japan is right hand drive). Every model/engine has to be homologated (fancy word for certified and tested) to US standards. This is costly. For the more expensive variants, the market is usually fairly small so the car maker might just decide that they won’t sell enough to justify the costs.
Also, car makers cannot simply import vehicles – they must also bring in spare parts for a number of years, train the dealers/service how to repair the cars and translate/train/advertise marketing and sales people. The turbocharged x cylinder hyper tuned engine with all the fancy stuff is usually made in a special factory and the parts and training to repair will be difficult across the ocean.
Sometimes, it just doesn’t make much sense to pay many hundreds of thousands of dollars to only sell a few hundred more cars with that engine.
On top of that, the market for small cars is dying in the US. And that is even worse for the fancier models of small cars. The US market favors pickup trucks and SUVs.
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