Off on a tangent, really, but I was recently reading Clive James’s memoirs about growing up in postwar Australia under the “Empire Free
Trade” regime (i.e. basically “buy British” imposed by law). This condemned
Australians to those awful British automobiles, with fenders that fell off
when you started the engine, and trunks that never closed properly. James
says that when the first Volkswagens arrived in Australia “they were hailed
as liberators.”