Funnily your last point invalidates your first. Most Americans are loaded on debt, which impacts how much actual money they have left over at the end of the month. How many Americans can't stomach a $1000 surprise bill again?
> Isn’t your argument basically saying that people choose to buy larger cars when the government doesn’t step in and penalize people for doing so? European regulators basically just forcing people to buy smaller cars is what that sounds like.
No, you're looking at this the wrong way. US regulators make bigger cars more lucrative for manufacturers, so they only do that. EU regulators mostly focus on safety and emissions, which also slightly favours bigger cars (whose bigger price absorbs the safety features better), but not nearly to the same extent. Two of the biggest EU car groups (Stellanti and Renault) both are publicly asking to reduce some of the burden for smaller cars to be able to make cheaper small cars. On the other hand, US manufacturers (even Stellantis' Jeep, Dodge, Ram) don't mind just churning oversized monstrosities.
> The poorest American state, Mississippi, is richer per-capita than most European countries, including France.
GDP per capita doesn't mean what you think it does. Everything being overpriced in the US, and everything needing to have a middleman inflates GDP figures. Take health insurance, Americans pay multiple times what Europeans pay, to stuff the pockets of multiple for profit institutions and middlemen. GDP figures look better in the US, but really, which way is more efficient? Health outcomes are better across the EU, and the amount of medical bankruptcies is also telling.