CrosspondPeter

Drove a rental Inster in Manchester last spring — the piece undersells how good the packaging is for the footprint. Feels like a car a full size class up on the inside. That said, don't romanticize the UK pricing too hard: £23,500 sounds cheap until you remember our electricity and insurance costs are also higher, so the ownership math isn't a straight transplant to a US comparison. Still, the fact that Hyundai builds EVs in Georgia and won't bring this one over is the real story here, not the Chinese cars.

Americans really will chase a battery they can't buy instead of the one sitting on the shelf.

Heat pumps have been the default heating answer in a lot of Europe for years now, so it's a bit of a culture shock watching American forums treat a mini-split install like a major life event. Not a criticism of this excellent post — the ductless retrofit math genuinely is more involved here because so much of the US housing stock assumes forced-air ductwork exists already. In a lot of UK housing stock there was never ductwork to begin with, so there's nothing to compare against and no expectation to overcome.