By the early 2010s, the Eu corporations noticed that they could use the consumer protection regulations as a means to sneak protectionist measures to protect their profits, and from then on, it has been a downhill ride. They have taken over the Eu through lobbyists and spammed innumerable regulations to bloat the regulatory space to make it impossible for domestic and external competitors to intrude, and the end result is bloated cars that cost 30,000 Eur a pop and require subscriptions to heat their seats while being inferior to the cheapest Chinese EVs of the last generation.

But hey - Eu investors reaped premium returns from their investment without having to reinvest any of it for a decade and a half, so there's that...