Hmmm... yeah, well... there is a fundamental difference, though: Luxury sedans aren't on top of our sales lists.
The F-150 is a bit of an odd duck. It's difficult to tell which are bought for personal commuting and which are bought for commercial purposes - so they just lump them all in. I think that if you rule out the fleet/commercial truck sales, though, you'd end up with numbers roughly comparable to, say, the percentage of German sedans (3 series and up, C-class and up) that are sold in Germany.
Also, some of the pickups get better gas mileage than your German sedans do. Or has BMW made a petrol-powered 7 that gets more than 28mpg yet?
Hm, nope, just checked with fueleconomy.gov. The most efficient 7 on sale in the US right now is the 750i, which gets 15 city/23 highway. The Colorado 2WD pickup gets 18/24.
Well, let's look at the 135i with a manual transmission. Oh, look, it's a "small, efficient German sedan" that gets.... 17/25. And costs almost three times as much as a Colorado.
Which one is more wasteful, especially if you do mostly city driving or sit in traffic a lot?
Seems to me that some of your "small efficient cars" aren't really all that efficient. And before you mention the diesel variants, allow me to let you in on a little secret - most of the European diesel engines are FAR too polluting to be allowed into the US. That's right - those "save the earth with fuel efficiency" engines are actually gross polluters. Surprise!
Thanks for bringing the attention to that article. If I may quote from it: Vojtech Hainer, president of IASO's European section, said Germans had not yet reached US levels of obesity. "Of all industrial states the US is the country with the highest proportion of obese people," he told SPIEGEL ONLINE.
I never saw someone pouring sugar into his cola here so far...
There is a later BBC article that says otherwise. Unfortunately, I can't find it right now, since I'm doing this odd thing called "work".
You compare sales figures of 19.000 per year (for 7-series and S-class) in Germany with the sales figures of pickup trucks in the USA? That really is absurd, I'll give you that
No, I'm comparing all of your petrol sedans from BMW and Mercedes and Audi to the percentage of non-commercial/fleet sales of trucks in the US. As I said above, once you remove those from the equation, I suspect the percentages are roughly similar between private truck sales in the US and German luxury sedans (i.e., everyone but VW) in Germany.
How about you studying my start topic on the first page again and than take into consideration that about half of the cars you see listed there, are clean, modern diesels that do 35 or 40 miles to the gallon?
Mmm, yes, the so called "clean diesels". The ones that are so clean, they're banned from import into the US because they don't meet emissions standards? Those "clean diesels"?