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Comment by AlchemistCamp | Hacker News Reader

France is a medium-sized market, roughly equivalent to California—much smaller than the US, China or Japan, but larger than many countries.

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Unless the market size for a population is not proportional to that population, then I'm missing something. France is ~67 million people. California is ~40 million people. There are ~330 million US citizens. So France is ~double California and ~ a fifth of the US.

And car companies comply with California's emissions laws rather than miss out on California sales, so it seems like "pulling out" is unlikely.

That's only the case as long as complying with California's emissions laws is not too much harder than what they would otherwise have to comply with. That's a complicated analysis, it's kinda got a bit of prisoner's dilemma to it. As long as companies are following CA's restrictive emissions laws, there's little incentive for other areas to make their own laws more restrictive. If companies started to ignore CA's laws (and not sold there or sold different versions) you should expect other states to start to pass more and more restrictive laws.

There are ten other states that follow California’s regulations, so you’ll lose a lot more than just California.

>Unless the market size for a population is not proportional to that population

It's not. US Population is maybe ~1/4th of India. Apple has a huge market in the US and is relatively niche in India.

It depends on what kind of market you're in. California is extremely high income relative to France (or pretty much any country) and so you're likely to see more revenue from there.

I was speaking of the relative sizes of the economies, not the populations.

Both France and California have a GDP of about 2.7 trillion USD. Interestingly, India's GDP is also at about this level.

You must take into account that France is relatively poor compared to America.

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