The Kia (or КИ) Niro is a rebadged Hyundai Kona, both based on the K3 platform. They share drivetrains, but the interfaces can differ quite a bit, e.g. with one using physical buttons and the other using capacitive buttons.

Bottom line: You're probably looking for a 4th gen 4Runner with the 2UZ-FE ;)

Counterfactual: Europeans pay far more for both their cars and fuel than Americans do. This historical disadvantage forced brutal competition in weight and fuel efficiency, making European cars technically far superior in those areas.

Furthermore, strict emission regulations and the influx of Chinese EVs have pushed the European auto industry into massive investments in electrification. Today, leaving Tesla, Korean, and Chinese automakers aside, the only legacy manufacturers with their entire structure transformed and dedicated platforms ready for the EV era are the Europeans: VW Group, BMW, Mercedes, Stellantis, and Renault.

That's the big problem for traditional American and Japanese automakers: they got comfortable relying on gas trucks and hybrids, respectively, and are falling way behind in the global race.

Kia trucks and similiar classes of products (cheap, robust, no fancy features, intensely practical) are very common in some places (notably some parts of Asia) but are also extremely hard to find in the US, primarily due to regulatory reasons. BYD cars are also often cheaper than US options, but are also not available in the US.

According to the Volkswagen website, a Golf starts at €29,835 € (incl. VAT) while according to the Ford website, a Ford F150 XL (which isn't exactly a monster truck) starts at $39,585 which Google tells me is around €35,263 (excl. VAT).

Europe is not necessarily the correct example as it artificially tweaks the market the same way USA do: with tariffs.

Look at latin america, asia, africa or oceania. Chinese cars everywhere, and not only electric, ICE market is also flooded with brands named after seemingly random letters like on those chinese electronics sold on amazon.

Young people are irrelevant, they don't buy new cars at all. EV transition is about new car buyers. They are on average 53 and almost all 45+. These are doing just fine.

Are you looking at the USSR and countries that followed its model?

I don't think you can look at any authoritarian regime and make assumptions about how an economic system performs. The autocratic features tend to cause society to break down.

For an actual anarchist production model, look no further than Open Source. It's built by people who self organize, to solve problems that are real (and often to make silly, inefficient things). It's often (but not always) motivated by something other than profit. It's people who believe in a credo organizing themselves around that credo and building the tools to sustain that credo.

But imagine if open source was behind an autocrat, there's no way it'd be nearly as rich or flourishing.

State regulations, to prevent market distortions like monopolies, price fixing, lying about products and selling poisoned food, among other things?

"goods people got in countries that didn't practice capitalism" are generally built to last.

> something has to mediate the resource allocation and effort of society towards providing that want/need at a certain quality/price

Yeah, exactly, not "squeezing every last bit of value out of a product to appease the shareholders", see "enshittification".

Well it lasted 10 years less for pretty much same thing... Talking about my 27" 1440p monitor. Dell is still working. The 4 year old Asus have most likely some type of power issue and doesn't even want to start.

The device I'm currently using has no headphone jack, no removable battery, no removable memory, no removable storage, a single solitary USB-A port and a locked-down BIOS that only lets you install Windows by default. All in the name of profit.

Yes, the device I'm currently using is worse than the equivalent model was 10 years ago. Thanks, capitalism.

Now compare clothing. Or Pyrex. Or the chocolate in candy bars.

> The device you're currently using is worse than the equivalent model was 10 years ago?

It is increasingly less and less mine at every iteration. I owned every bit of my dad's 386.

Regulatory capture (occasionally outright banning a superior product, but usually just raising the cost of competition) as well as anti-competition wrapped up in acquisition culture severely impair this.

That already exists. If it weren’t for punitive tariffs, we’d already be enjoying cheap, high quality Chinese vehicles in the U.S. and Canada, like many other countries do already.

Industrialization and automation brought down the cost of goods, making them much more accessible to more people.

But they absolutely simultaneously resulted in lower quality goods in many areas.

As an example, people used to buy hand crafted furniture after buying an home, and it lasted them a lifetime because it was made with such high quality material and with such craftsmanship. It was also very expensive, which motivated keeping it for so long and passing it on to future generations.

Today the furniture we buy is much less expensive as a percentage of income but the quality is crap and you may end up needing to replace it once the finish has worn off because refinishing would be as expensive as buying another crap quality piece of furniture.

The same goes for clothing and many other goods.

It’s not that nobody makes any high quality goods anymore, but they are several times the price and are very low volume because of the cheap crappy alternatives.

I am sure that your life is better now thanks to the spy device always in your pocket and not because of the advances in medicine, education, human rights...