Quote:
Originally Posted by Hersbird
I don't care that the car companies don't want to undercut their profits.
Walmart can support...
My dad's small town store can hardly support...
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The second part explains why there's more to the first part than simple rent seeking. Your dad's store serves a market. A tiny one. So tiny that no matter how much he charges for stuff, he won't net all that much and no matter how much stock he orders, his suppliers won't give him very good prices. Wal-Mart buys so much that it has a gun to its suppliers' heads and sells so much that it can afford to undercut your dad and still make tons of money.
In the car business, Paul Elio is your dad. He is producing (or at least attempting to) a cheap, efficient car. A really nice one that lots of users here want to buy. But his scale sucks- his development efforts aren't being subsidized by sales of other models currently in production. His suppliers see his orders as basically one-off custom jobs, not anything that they can spread their costs over millions of parts. He can't sell enough units to keep things running unless he has a sales network- and unless the Pep Boys (was it them?) idea works, he'll have to build that on his own, store by store. Nobody's going to sign up to sell a car that they can't make money on.
I don't care that the car companies don't want to undercut their profits either, but
there's the only market that matters. Manufacturers won't put money into something that their customers won't put money into. I can't drive a car that I can't buy and I can't buy a car that the car companies won't build. They won't build a car that will undercut their profits. A real bare bones car from the big boys will hurt their profits in many ways, but look at bare bones cars from the past- either they lasted long enough to move upmarket and survive like the Japanese and Koreans or they didn't, like Yugo.
You need to sell a lot of cheap cars to make enough money to survive, and there isn't a big enough market in the US for stripped down cars to make them worth building. You can probably do a kit car with only the safety features that you want, but you can buy a lot of nice used cars for a lot less time and money if you're willing to have an airbag or two. Are you running a Hersbird-Spec Locost, or is your automobile market participation limited to a used Aspen with a Hemi?
Don't argue about what you ought to be allowed to do if there's no viable market for doing it- nobody can make a profit selling you the car you want and you haven't built one yourself. Do you think eliminating requirements for airbags, seatbelts, ABS, stability control and the like will give us a budget package for the Yaris? I think it'll give us a track package for the Corvette instead. Because that's what the market here is willing to buy.
It's not oppression, just business. Market driven business.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Frank Lee
They say safety then text while speeding off.
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They say safety so that they can blissfully text.
