[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by SuperTrooper

james, your wants are unique and don't reflect what most buyers want. Most people find 2 seaters fairly impractical. Similar to sports cars.

Unusual, perhaps, but hardly unique. There are quite a few two-seaters in the parking lot here (research lab in Silicon Valley, so there's a lot of disposable income), many with names like Porsche & BMW. And again, I don't think Mazda lost money on the Miata, or Honda on the CRX :-)

Seating for 4 is the reason that the Prius was such a big success vs the Insight. It is a practical vehicle in addition to being a statement. Let's not forget that Honda lost money on every Insight it ever sold.

Let's not forget that the Insight was a real-world experiment, and Honda INTENDED to lose money on it. That's why they priced them at much less than cost of production from day one, and never tried to sell more than the limited production they intended.

Regarding the Mini, it is marketed as a sports car, with the retro/nostalgia angle thrown in. Oh, and look what's happened: in response to focus group studies they've added a LARGER model...

YES! You're getting it now: small two-seater = sports car, and they sell. And now that you've got a production line set up for your popular two-seater, why not make a model with four seats that shares many of the same parts (& marketing), so as to leverage investment? It'll be interesting to see how sales of the Mini Clubman will affect sales of the standard model. My guess is that the standard will stay about the same, and the Clubman sales will be an increase.

You have one concept backwards: auto design and advertising FOLLOWS trends discovered in focus group testing.

And how many people do they have in these focus groups, a few dozen? So the process automatically trims off a lot of the outliers before it even starts. Then they go with what the majority of the focus group wants. Is it suprising that they never come up with anything but the least common denominator?

With what new cars cost now most people can't afford to give up the practicality of carrying more than one passenger.

Why is the ability to carry more than one passenger supposed to be practical? In five years of owning the Insight (and many more years of two-seaters before that), I can count the number of times I wanted to carry multiple people on the fingers of one foot :-)

The Insight and the smart are statement cars that cost more than others and are bought to make a statement: "Look at me!"

ALL cars are statements, even if the statement is "I don't need anything more than basic transportation". Would you like to argue that SUVs and penis-styled, jacked-up 4WD pickups aren't statement cars for 99% of their buyers? (Not just statements, in most cases, but outright lies :-)) As for the cost, the Insight cost less new than most of those, and way less than the closest comparison (in size & shape) I can think of: the 911 Porsche.