Here in the United States, a car shopping is a bit different joy compared to Finland (and quite many European countries I believe).

Mini Cooper Clubman (John Cooper Works)First of all, the amount of the choices is huge. You can easily count some fifty common car makes available, speaking of all the available models and specialties. To get somehow started, guidance from car sites like Cars.com or Edmunds.com is really needed. I'd spend hours and hours to browse through these sites before even thinking of which car I want.

US are a big market and heavily competed. And because you practically cannot live without a car (excluding the Manhattan, of course), the pricing needs to be – and practically is – in a quite reasonable level. In contrary, Nordic countries like Finland are small markets and the regulations/taxes increases the prices quite a lot. For example, Volkswagen Passat with 2.0l engine and automatic transmission costs roughly $30000 here, similar thing tops about 52000€ in Finland (when writing this, about $72000, according Google).

Another thing I was surprised was the size of the inventories. When I bought my first car (new), I dictated the exact specification for the cars, including external and internal colors, packages, accessories etc., only to learn that sales guys found the car ready-made only less than 200 miles away! So I got that car in two days instead of months of factory delivery.

After having a hunch what make you are interested in, you walk in to the nearest car dealer. Once you have been assigned to a dealer, you better remember to ask him every time when calling or visiting. At the beginging I did not care about this and therefore ended up into uncomfortable situations where dealers where arguing together why one had served another’s customer. Of course they do care who gets the sales bonuses.

Buying process itself is a bit more straightforward business compared to Finland. I usually do too much asking and considering, dealers get frustrated and say “I don’t know can you order with that option or how what that thing means, nobody has ever asked”. My colleague told me that in one shop (big brand dealer!) they even did not have a test drive car and when asked do people buy without test driving they said “yes, what’s the problem in that?”

However, right now the whole car industry is shaking as you may already know. The gas price is peaking, making premium fuel (highest octave) over $4 per gallon. That is roughly 0.76€ per liter (currently according Google), compared to 1.50 € in Finland.

$4 may sound cheap for somebody, but if the smallest engine for any BMW model sold here is six sylinder 3.0l, you understand the problem (at least if you are european :-). Or looking a specification of a typical domestic sedan, you see consumption numbers around 15 MPG (miles per gallon) for a city driving. That is something like 16 l/100km.

Hybrids are in, supricingly, and you may end up waiting half a year of your Toyota Prius. More diesels are available, right now you can get for example BMW X5 3.0d or several Mercedes Benz sedans. Unfortunately people here still remember the diesels from the 70’s, when they got banned because of causing unbelievable smog and pollution problems in the US big cities. Also, four cylinder cars are still considered as… um, under powered.

The fact is that people here are reacting to the changes in environmental thinking and costs of ownership. I believe during next years this country sees more and more small city cars so polular in Europe already today.