Quote:
Originally Posted by Hersbird
How is $850 in 2001 only $500 in current money? Plus how much have they added since 2001?
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That's $800 for
everything. I thought we were talking about airbags, since that's the big ticket item everyone harps on, and about the only safety item listed that's optional nowadays.
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Most of those items are standard now because of market demands. Remove FMVSS, and they'd still come standard. Except for airbags. Which either cost $500 or not nearly as much.
That's because of economies of scale. At this point, all cars come assembled with airbags and side impact bars in mind. Above a certain price point, offering cars without certain items costs the manufacturer more than simply making them standard. Because then they have to engineer two different sub-assemblies, source them in two different batches, etcetera... and this drives the price of each vehicle up.
It's only in very, very cheap cars, for example, where you can get non-power windows. That's because a power window motor assembly costs less due to economies of scale than a manual crank that you'll only put on maybe 5% of your products.
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I'm not suggesting these things are zero cost. Indeed, having side curtain and knee airbags is simply chasing tinier and tinier percentages of injury with more and more money...
But we can actually buy new cars at the exact same price, inflation adjusted, as old cars of similar size and utility, with all that safety equipment AND better performance and economy... surely that ought to be celebrated?
All that's left, really, is to decouple the regulations. Cars already gain or lose sales based on EPA numbers or crash ratings. There's no need to make getting good ones mandatory. Consumer preference and insurance premiums will take care of that quite nicely.
Just as consumer preference is killing the manual transmission.
