> A wealthy nation with a small population that has plenty of money to update their infrastructure is not comparable to upgrading the grid and converting the fleet of 250M cars in the US, which is a mess of 50 states who spend varying amounts of money on their infrastructure.

The US is plenty wealthy per capita, around the same or more than Norway. It has plenty of money to upgrade it's infrastructure, it just chooses to spend it on other goals such as bombing Iran.

> The US is plenty wealthy per capita

This is not a particularly useful statistic when talking about the number of cars being bought.

Almost invariably, "per capita wealth" uses mean wealth. This is dramatically different from the median wealth.

When you've got a few individual people worth upwards of $200 billion, that means that each one of them adds roughly $1000 to the "per capita wealth" number, while only ever accounting for something like a dozen cars at the outside.