Boils down to different strokes for different people.
Naw, I kind of just stick around and fight. Thing is I remember when there was no sales tax and it was a small temporary tax. Then grew and grew as the money rolled in. Then I also remember when real estate taxes were based on the last sale price of the property instead of current value. So it’s the old rule of Econ-unlimited wants, but if you let them, it will never be enough money to meet all the wants. Even if tax was 100%, they’d still have to use the credit card. Just reality.
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Just your reality.
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Well to bring it back to reality, the FIAT 500 (1/2 liter displacement) was never considered a “real car” in the US, more like those Micro Cars like the early DKW’s and BMW’s.
And the other hand the the Beetle, Minor and I’d add l’d add the FIAT 850 were very much Niche cars for kids, school teachers and aspiring sportscar drivers who were short on cash but long on aspirations but short of cash. They would do 60 MPH on the flat but going up a steep hill …
But more to the point, these were very light cars and were stripped of most of the things that most folks would consider essential today. Crash protection, A/C, automatic transmission, etc.
Frankly, if these cars would somehow be allowed new in the market today I doubt that anyone would buy them at any price.
“Honey, I just bought a new car, no airbags, no ABS, no power steering, no power brakes, no rear window defroster, no automatic transmission, no A/C, questionable parts and service and BTW to get in you have to lift the doors and step over the large sills.” 
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In the 1970s a friend’s older brother and his roommate both had Fiat 500s. They were in Med School and were poor. The only time they had problems with them was when they had to drive from home in suburban DC to Baltimore to attend school. The Fiat couldn’t get over 50 mph. Their solution was to take a surface street to US1, also not a highway, and drive to Baltimore. Much safer that way. I don’t think car theft was a thing back then and besides, who in their right mind would steal a Fiat 500? In case you aren’t aware, the John’s Hopkins Medical Institute is in an awful part of town, even 50 years ago.
I think that some people would buy them, but there wouldn’t enough customers to keep such a vehicle in the marketplace for more than 1 year or so.
Most people want modern creature comforts and enough power to be able to safely accelerate onto an expressway, so the sales of such vehicles would probably only be possible in Third World countries. However, as you implied, the absence of modern safety features would prevent them from being sold in The US, Canada, Australia, and most of Europe.
One car I remember as a kid was the 1949 Nash 600. It has a 173 cubic inch engine that produced 82 horsepower. The top speed was about 75 mph. Most of those cars were equipped with the Borg-Warner overdrive. The “inverted bathtub” design of the Nash gave it about half the wind resistance of other makes of the same size. It was a roomy, comfortable riding car. If one wanted more power, one could pay more and get the Ambassador.
I once owned a 1950 Chevrolet 3800 one ton pickup truck. It had a 235 cubic inch 6 cylinder engine. I was able to haul 50 bales of hay on the truck at a time. I stretched wire fence with the truck. I put the transmission into “granny” low gear and had the fence so tight you could play tunes on the fence. The speedometer never worked on the truck, but it probably wouldn’t run faster than about 55 mph.
In my opinion, it is more important how the power of the engine is applied than the horsepower rating. The 1949 Nash 600 was designed for comfortable road travel and 25 mpg economy. The 1950 Chevrolet pickup I owned was designed for work.
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On the topic of engine power, this morning I had the misfortune to be at the end of a line of cars following in back of a late-model Prius as we were about to merge onto I-287. The nimrod driving the Prius merged into the 65-75 mph traffic at 24 mph. 
Luckily, I was able to blast past him once the center lane was clear, and then I was able to see that he was peering at… something… on his console or on the passenger seat, rather than actually paying attention to his driving. At the point that I passed him, he had gotten up to the blistering speed of 50 mph, so he was still endangering himself and everyone else on that expressway.
While a Prius might not be a powerhouse, it definitely has sufficient power to be able to merge at an appropriate speed. But, a car that is being piloted by an oblivious fool is likely going to be driven inappropriately.
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Haa, I have been cruising at 80 MPH and have a Prius blow past me like I was tied to a stump… 
Yup! They are not the extremely low-power wimps that some folks perceive them to be. And, the 2024 Prius has a bit more power than the older ones, but I think that the one obstructing expressway traffic this morning was probably 3-5 years old.
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It’s not that he is lacking power, he is more concerned about keeping his MPG up.
Probably his MPG gauge.
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Nah, looking at a phone for something.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure that he was staring at a phone, or maybe even a tablet.
Yeah it’s stereotyping but I can still see the guy. I used to encounter a Prius driver on the way home from time to time on the open road. We must have been on the same schedule. Straw hat, nose in the air. He’d be puttering along a little slower than me. When I’d go to pass him, he’d speed up to put me in my place. I’d just
step on the gas more to show him that a 3800 Buick had power to spare. I don’t know what he did but alway took the college town exit.
You’re thinking of the 57. The 283 had 195 HP with the 2 barrel and 220 HP with the 4V. The 56 Belair had a 265, I don’t remember its HP ratings but they weren’t as high as the 57.
Dual Quad equipped 56’s had 225hp or 205 with the single 4bbl. Can’t recall exactly which carb my teachers 265 V8 had but it was a lot of fun to let loose on the back road with rolling hills as he told us about with a huge grin.
2010 and Newer Prius has more than enough power to merge onto the highway at the same speed as traffic. Mom looked at buying a 2009 new but it felt too much like her old 48hp VW Diesel for comfort. Know a bunch of Prius owners and none of them would get onto the freeway that slow, but would get up to the flow of traffic and maybe stay to the right at the speed limit. Mom admits she spends more time watching what the other driver’s are doing than watching the speedometer. We’d had the car less than a day before tackling the hill to get to my brother’s house, figured out afterwards that if you tap the Power button on the console that quickens throttle response then it climbs the hill with ease, the first time up the hill it crawled it’s way up.
Hadn’t encountered a hill like that on the drive from the dealership or the test drive a week before.
She had a rash of incidents when she first had the Prius where other drivers seemed to either pretend they couldn’t see her or otherwise cut her off. Never happened to her in her previous Mazda but if they saw it was a Prius you lost the right of way.
Value added tax (VAT) to the end consumer instead of taxes at every stage of production. Usually waived if the item was exported. That’s one of the reasons why imported products can seem reasonable in spite of tariffs.