[bold]Car culture[/bold] Tell someone you are going to Chicago from your home in Portland, Maine and he might ask, with an American abundance of enthusiasm, 'Oh, are you driving?!" Driving 1750 miles and 16 hours is always a possibility for Americans. The cost of driving €178-258) is within a very similar range to the cost of flying (€143-348) and even similar to the ranges of train-bus ( €99-332) and bus travel via 4 buses (€75-556) though at a harsh cost in time at 24 and 29 hours.
For a European, however, there is little chance that he would ever consider driving the similar distance of 1200km and 12 hours Rome and Vienna. He could fly one-way from Rome for €38 and 4.5 hours; take a train of 12 hours for €117 or a night train of the same time for half the price; or a bus for 15.5 hours and €60 -- and many other combinations of train/flight. But cars in the US are so much more than simple transportation. They are symbols of freedom, of road trips, of status, of suburban life, of rural life, strip malls and shopping malls and schools that you can't walk to are built along the highways that serve the cars, the highways that go everywhere that buses and trains don't. Bicycles? What? They are seen as pure nuisance and the opposite of status (I remember warning my European partner that a 30-something white man on a bicycle was often regarded as suspect or even with derision, the assumption that he had lost his driver's license and had to step down in the world because of too many DUIs.
It's crazy that highways were made such a priority, that urban centers were routinely bisected and sectioned and ruined with scheming contempt or cold indifference to urbanism and to residents. It's crazy that except for parts of the Northeast Corridor, the US has a terrible system of train transportation, not even a skeleton of a system but a few scattered bones or lines that are inconvenient, unpleasant, and oddly costly. It's crazy that a patchwork system of Chinese buses is both vastly better and vastly cheaper than the tattered remains of a once extensive bus network. And it's crazy that a few hours flight between non-hub US cities can cost more than a trip from Chicago to London (had they colluded in a cabal, the automobile manufacturers could scarcely have done better in working against airlines.)
[bold]American exceptionalism and Hyper-competitiveness[/bold] Both strong points already mentioned. I'll just add that as an American living in Europe, I see all the time groups of American tourists who seem a little disappointed not to have a red carpet rolled out for them. In my observation, a significant part of the 'loud talking American' image is true, but it's not entirely natural. Not everyone in the US talks like a second grade teacher to a class of unruly children (or Rachel Ray); I think it's to draw attention to their Americanness, to solicit questions and conversation...All so that they can engage these foreigners in whose country they are in a point-by-point comparison of what the US has that's bigger, better, stronger, faster, etc.
Of course travel is inevitably about comparison, the geography, the architecture, the people, the customs, the colors, the sounds, the food, it's either different or similar to what we have known from other places. But I swear that Americans will compare to death and beyond any tiny little thing and it always comes around to a explanation that the Oktoberfest in Munich is really just like the Iowa State Fair, or gelato is exactly like the soft-serve at the DairyQueen in wherever. Nothing may be left uncompared, and always with a competitive bent. Everything is bigger, of course, and by extension better (you'd think they were talking about dicks, except, well, that comparison doesn't hold up so well..)