US vehicles tend not to be offered in right-hand drive, since neither of the major RHD markets (UK and Japan) are particularly receptive to US vehicles. It’s a self-reinforcing phenomenon.
That’s the problem with niche vehicles: there’s only a finite amount of demand for them. This is why I’m skeptical about electric car companies like Tesla. There’s a certain amount of pent-up demand, but after that’s exhausted, it’s going to be tough to move them.
Japan isn’t receptive to anything that isn’t made in Japan. US cars aren’t particularly noteworthy in that regard.
Most US cars, including virtually all pickup trucks, seem to have red turn signals, most of the imports have amber except for Honda which keeps switching back and forth. That’s how they did the safety study, for vehicles that switched colors without a major redesign figure out the rear end accident rate before and after the switch, and found amber was 6.1% effective. I laugh when they put in all kinds of thousand dollar airbags in and such but could make a vehicle safer with a cheap light bulb.
http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811115.PDF
Au contraire. The VW Golf and BMWish Mini are among Japan’s 20 best sellers. The top 14 (all Kei cars) are Japanese, but things even out a bit after that. The Merc C-Class and BMW 3 Series are close to the top 20.
One very clear example of this is Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 108 (FMVSS 108) which prior to 1984 required sealed beam headlights within a specific set of performance and dimensional parameters. This is why you see many performance cars from that era with pop-up headlamps (in order to give provisions for forward illumination while allowing for a sloped hood profile), whereas today headlights are much smaller and better integrated into the vehicle outer mold line.
And example of this is the Ferrari Daytona which originally had fixed lamps under an acrylic cover, but because of FMVSS 108 had to redesign for the pop-up headlights in order to homologate (be in accordance with) US regulations. The process turned out to be so onerous that Ferrari didn’t even bother to make the Daytona’s successor, the 365 GT Berlinetta Boxer, compliant with US regulations. They did end up redressing the unimpressive (in terms of performance) Dino series of cars in Berlinetta clothing, which (along with the use of the car in Magnum, P.I. repopularized Ferrari in the US, but it wasn’t until the Ferrari Testarossa was homologated in 1985 that the US got to drive factory-direct Ferrari flat-12 cars (although enthusiasts had imported the Berlinetta and gone through the individual process of getting DOT compliance at a cost exceeding the purchase price of the car).
Homologation often doesn’t require redesign, just retesting and demonstration of compliance, but this can be expensive (including destructive testing of several cars), so unless a manufacturer thinks that there is significant market interest and can get a reasonable network of dealers to sell his cars, it just isn’t worth it even if the car can clearly meet safety and emissions standards.
Stranger
Chalk me up as an ignorant American because I just Googled ‘rear fog light’ images and they are the goofiest things I’ve ever seen! I can’t recall ever hearing about or seeing a European car with one. And I’m a little confused. It looks like some models only have one light, while others have two. How* do you* distinguish them from brake lights? Or is that the point? If it’s foggy it doesn’t matter if you can’t?
You distinguish them by the dull pain at the back of your eye as they burn a hole through your retina, especially when (a) people turn them on at the first sign of mist (“ooh, I can use my fog lights!”) and (b) then forget to turn them off for three days.
Seriously, they are like bright tail lights. How do you distinguish tail lights from brake lights?
believe it or not, the second-gen Olds Aurora had them.