Please don't make us "Europeans" look bad. The part of Europe I come from those kind of American cars are only considered "classy" by white thrash. Or people own them "ironically".
Then again, it's also been a few decades since owning a Porsche was a sign of good taste...
France here, and the Porsche seems to be a sort of toy, something like a Renault twingo[1], and don't ask me which one I prefer. :)
On the other side, the Cadillac has nice berline curve and make me think of our Citroen C6[2].
So, as we can see, design cars are culture local.
Can we say the same thing for UI design ? Maybe the ideal design for an american differs that the ideal design for an european or an asiatic person ?
I have always thought that only the job, the grade, and the period-to-computers-exposure change the way users interact with their machines. Obviously the problem is bigger.
I am convinced that this essay touch right in the hearth something fundamental about cultural differences and their influences in design choices. In the same way that the GP languages for real people are not Lisp and Smalltalk but Java/C#, Python and Ruby. If Lisp is a widely used language, so are Ocaml and Erlang, but the let's face it: they're not.
So in conclusion, I think I will definitely not design the same UI for an US pg than for an EU pg, it need being study in details but there is differences in the mind and in the tastes, so that one have to adapt to the UI of the others.
Then again, it's also been a few decades since owning a Porsche was a sign of good taste...