Quote:
Originally Posted by redpoint5
What you say makes sense, though not precisely how you put it. If the Arcimoto was free, there would be way more than 50k customers, so price always plays a factor in demand. There might even be people somewhere that wouldn't take a free one, but would if you paid them. Then there's probably a few that would be willing to pay $50,000 for one.
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Yeah, taking the argument ad absurdum, you could find some linear relationship between price and customer volume that would (theoretically) extend into the company paying its customers to take the product. But in the real world I don't think that works. Even further down in your post--rather than spend $5,000 on a used Arcimoto, you would spend $5,000 on a Leaf because of the differences in utility, comfort, safety, etc.
But going back to the Lightyear--that's all well and good for the company to say it wants to sell 100,000 of them per year at $55,000, but does that market even exist? And if the price is lowered to, say, $35,000, could they expect to sell 200,000/year or would there only be 100,000 people each year who actually want one at any price, and the other 100,000 theoretical customers are buying SUVs anyway?
All this is just conjecture on my part anyway; I'm sure the Lightyear people have done at least some market research. But I still wonder how accurate those numbers are; after all, Fisker expected to sell a lot of cars too and we all saw how that went. Or for a more extreme example, Elio.