> why does it appears as if this isn't much of a thing outside of the US?

American hobby woodworkers all have huge two- or three-car garages giving them the room needed to store and use gigantic machines like table saws. Such large homes are unusual in Europe, and mostly owned by people who don't work with their hands.

European hobby woodworkers don't lose their fingers to table saws because they're using circular saws instead.

I suspect America also has a lot more woodworkers; many of their buildings have wood frames, wood siding, and bitumen-over-wood roofs.

Lot of replies here but none of them have really hit the mark. European table saws are fundamentally different than American table saws, where the entire section left of the blade slides forward. Culturally it seems Europeans believe this is "safer" than the American style and therefore they don't need the blade safety mechanism. Personally I think that's nonsense, and apparently so do some of the companies because they've developed their own mechanism that they only use on their priciest saws.

Woodworking YouTube has changed this a bit. Since American creators are so widespread, everyone has gotten exposed to SawStop and I know at least a couple years back people were trying to import American-style table saws instead of the local European-style because that's what YTers have. I don't know if it was regulatory or what that has prevented the former from being more available in Europe.

> why does it appears as if this isn't much of a thing outside of the US?

Patents. SawStop does not sell outside the US/NA to my knowledge and they hold all the patents required.

In 2015 Bosch introduced a system that did essentially the same thing as SawStop, but with a slightly different mechanism. SawStop sued in the US and won against Bosch.

Since 2017 SawStop is part of Festool, which explains why their tech is slowly making their way into Festool products. For example, the TKS 80 has the SawStop functionality built in. But at an MSRP of ~2.500€ it’s not really a hobbyist machine.

One reason could also be that the US woodworking culture treats a table saw as an essential tool (especially the basic table saw, without a sliding table), while elsewhere track saws are used more, it seems.

If you run commercial production, then you do need a table saw (but one with a sliding table!), but for hobby work you might as well spend some time for track saw setups and be much safer.

Sawstop wasn't available for purchase in the EU until last month. The only version that was available was the very expensive Festool table saw, though they are both from the same company. I'm currently waiting on my compact Sawstop to be shipped from the first batch.

Table saws are less common in Europe for hobbyists, also things like dado blades are effectively banned, which means we actually use the blade guards that come with saws. We tend to use routers for a lot of the things Americans will use a table saw for.

I believe they just don't market them there, probably not interested in confirming to all the different regulations for different markets, etc. I know some folks have imported them, but I don't think they are sold directly. I think Laura Kampf claims to have one of the first SawStops in Europe.