Mazda is indeed one of the sleeper brands. Not only do they have excellent interiors for their price, if you had driven that 3 you would have discovered they are extremely sporty and fun cars to drive too!

In America I’d only lease any of the European brands. Parts are harder to come by, fewer people want to mess with/repair them (you can always get shafted at the dealer, but that’s pretty much universal) and reliability on them is not the best.

Give me a good used Japanese car (except for Mitsubishi) any day.

Your vehicle is basically your living room. I don't fault anyone for wanting to be comfortable, especially in rural america where its literally an hour to get anywhere.

In countries and cities with usable public transit and density its naturally far less of a thing.

> It’s crazy how Americans are willing to drop $30-40K (that’s average?) for a vehicle. But I digress.

Market segmentation means you don't have a lot of choice.

A Toyota Camry (a quite basic mid-size car) starts at $25K. Even some of the cheapest cars sit at almost $20K and their safety ratings at US freeway speeds are often not great combined with being underpowered.

The fact that people have to drive on US freeways a lot means that you can't just engineer a small, slower speed car and call it a day.

$25K over 10 years isn’t terrible. People who feel they have to buy a new car every 2 to 4 years only have themselves to blame.

Then again, god bless them. If it wasn’t for all of them there wouldn’t be so many good used cars for me to choose from :)

Oh man you should visit India. Much denser concentration of Audi's, BMWs, etc than anything I've seen in the US. Especially in the past few years.

This is also true in most cities in China, especially the huge ones. In Shanghai German-made middle-to-high end models form a surprisingly high fraction of the cars.