The difference probably is that the scales are different in Germany. The largest city in the general area is Cologne with 1 million residents. There are a lot more much smaller towns in between and it's perfectly normal to drive from one town to another for shopping and services because the towns tend to be very close to each other.

You don't generally get these vast empty stretches of land between places in Germany, especially not in the West (the most densely populated region of Germany). But you also don't get American megacities like NYC, SF or LA.

Also autobahns make a lot of distances seem very small in Germany.

Not really. An hour drive is still an hour drive. The physical distances don't really matter much though if you don't happen to own a helicopter or it's short enough that you can walk or ride a bicycle.

The autobahn is frequently overestimated by foreigners. That there is no speed limit in principle doesn't mean that you can go any speed in practice. Most of the autobahn has speed limits and road works.

> Not really. An hour drive is still an hour drive.

An hour drive is an hour drive, but 60 miles is an hour drive in the US, it might be 30~45mn via the Autobahn or Schnellstraßen.

> s. That there is no speed limit in principle doesn't mean that you can go any speed in practice. Most of the autobahn has speed limits and road works.

Sure, but speed limits tend to be much higher than they are on US interstate.

In reality, few drivers on German roads go faster than 70-80mph. Mostly due to traffic, but even with free flowing traffic the minority drives much faster. It's nice to be able to drive fast if you have to, but a lot of people (especially on the country side) are very environmentally conscious, which doesn't go well with driving 120mph.

Many Large Engineering companies in Germany have their headquarters in relatively small towns. See Waldorf for SAP, Wolfsburg for VW, Zuffenhausen vor Porsche... There's many examples. Germany is pretty dense so many services are available Nationwide, and even the smallest towns usually have a few food delivery places that deliver to them. Normally the next larger city is less than an hour's drive by car away, so it's very doable to live in small towns. It also has a bit to do with salaries in Germany, which tend to be on the low side, even for highly qualified engineers if you compare it to SV levels.

Walldorf at least is 15min from Heidelberg/Mannheim. Zuffenhausen is literally a district of Stuttgart. And Wolfsburg is a city of 120.000 people, and already VW has to pay a good "Wüstenzulage" (desert bonus) to get top talent, so they can afford taking the ICE (fast train), which takes an hour to/from Berlin.

Sure, but neither Heidelberg/Mannheim nor Stuttgart and Wolfsburg really are that meet the criteria that american people consider "big cities".

We don't have that many million people hubs in Germany so it's more common. And even with "Wüstenzulage" many Engineering salaries at VW are nowhere compared to SV salaries for engineers.

How many automotive engineers in the US do you think live in a larger city? Even those in Michigan mostly don't live in Detroit proper--because it's Detroit, gentrification by the river notwithstanding. (The area around Dearborn, Troy, etc. is relatively built up of course but I'm not sure it's what a lot of people here think of as an urban lifestyle.)