[helsinkiandrew]

Many/most items that were designed many years ago in imperial - tyres etc - are still described in imperial units.

But here in Finland (a completely metric country) things like televisions are still marketed/sold as 44" etc where the cm value could very easily be used.

[vidarh]

A key distinction tends to be whether a value is mostly used for internal comparison.

E.g TV sizes are mainly compared with each other, and so the unit used doesn't really matter, and if you want to know the external dimensions it'll typically be given in metric in countries which uses it.