Quote:
Originally Posted by IamIan
It isn't a 'cost' of the Insight itself as a vehicle ... it is an artificially inflated price ... only seen in Australia... It isn't what the rest of the world pays.
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Cherry picking in the extreme. The Autoblog article refers to the Luxury car tax of ~50%. This tax affects cars over a certain price only. At the time of the 1st Gen I beleive the threshold was $47K, so the Insight buyer would have been slugged the tax only on the proportion over that amount. I also would imagine that if Honda could have kept the cars' price below that threshold, they would have.
It's easy to post the most expensive 'Sports/ Luxury' versions and say look how expensive they are.
Used Car Research - Used Car Prices - Compare Cars - RedBook.com.au
2004 Civic, $20,000, more expensive than the US? No doubt. By 100%? Not remotely.
http://www.redbook.com.au/cars/resea...idx=124&eapi=2
2000 Camry, $26,000, more expensive than the US? No doubt, By 100%? Not remotely. Worth noting that the Camry was locally built, and so NO IMPORT DUTY. It's higher price is at least partly due to higher Australian wages. It's hard to compare to to a US built car (with lots of parts from Mexico?).
We do tend to get slugged for factory options as these cars have to be specially ordered straight from the factory, shipped over etc. In the case of Porsche and Lexus, imagine the cost of building/ maintaining a dealership that might only sell 1000 cars a year. Pretty sure Honda didn't have this problem.
Keep in mind a 2014 Mirage is cheaper than in the US. Adjusted for currency that's US$9,200:
http://www.redbook.com.au/cars/resea...&Ridx=0&eapi=2
I think we can agree that at $17k, the first Gen Insight was far too cheap for an alloy bodied hybrid, particularly since at the time neither was mainstream for mass produced vehicles. I'd love to know exactly what they were 'worth', no doubt it's somewhere between what you guys paid and what they tried to charge us.
And bare in mind the current Insight costs $30k here, about on par with it's global price.