The difference in price being negligible in comparison does not mean the difference in servicing costs is not also negligible. Yes, it’s an addition to the total cost, but not a significant one. If less than five percent of the purchase price is going to break the sale, you’re spending more than you were really…

Scale is important here. If you’re spending $70k on a second/third car, $1k a year is quite literally nothing to you in relation to the cost of the purchase.

If people are paying more than MSRP because there aren’t enough cars available for them to buy, it’s pretty clear that they’d sell more cars if they produced them.  If they didn’t want to produce more, they set the MSRP too low for the market.

I don’t think you’re going to care about 1k a year if you’re buying a $70k car.

What would you buy:

Or, they could, you know, build more cars so that there’s no reason for anyone to pay over sticker. The manufacturer makes money on number of sales, not the price each car sells at.

And of course, holidays and snow days and summer vacation, which isn’t even consistent in the same city, let alone country-wide.

There were significant socialist/populist parties in the U.S. up until/through the world wars.  They only went away because the U.S.S.R. called it’s dictatorship communism and we basically outlawed the ideology in response.

Honestly, if I could be sure that’s the worst that’s going to happen to it, I’d go out and buy a V12 Jag from the 80s tomorrow.

The problem is that there are very few reliability studies that actually limit the impact to serious issues (i.e. it won’t start or dies and won’t restart).

Possibly because the parts literally do not exist. McLaren fixed up a few F1s by basically building all-new bodies, but $20 million leaves a lot more leeway than $300k.  maybe Alfa doesn’t have the tooling to make any more body panels, at least not for less than $300k including spinning up production?

All they actually stated was that speeding is more ‘unsolved’ than distracted driving, i.e., more common.

If you have to make sacrifices on a project car, sacrifice mechanicals first, every time.  Buy a car with a broken or missing engine, but a good interior and exterior. You cannot do cosmetic work yourself unless you do it for a living, and it’s insanely expensive.

Weight doesn’t affect drag from air resistance, but it does affect how much power it takes to keep the car moving, your tires aren’t frictionless.

I saw a yellow Porsche 918 being driven not only on the street but in a thunderstorm. In Ohio. Once saw a Ferrari 275 stuck in rush hour traffic too, but it was probably just a convincing fake. 

The base model 86 in Japan does not have a radio.  Can’t do that in the U.S. because backup cameras are mandatory here.

An equivalently over-engineered engine today would probably come in a $100k+ car and only have ~400HP. Overbuilding something is not cost effective unless your finances are near limitless.

It does help their brand loyalty/identity, though. Mazda has a pretty strong reputation in a very small portion of the market. A small company with a strong base is better than a small company that fails when it tries to expand too much.

Unless it’s a $150k car, in which case, 99% of the population couldn’t even consider the car without taking out a second mortgage.

I realize it’s a small portion of the market, but some people really don’t like turbos.