Yeah, but what portion of the market can realistically afford the luxury, and what portion of the market cannot afford it but buy in anyways? How do you explai

Yeah, but what portion of the market can realistically afford the luxury, and what portion of the market cannot afford it but buy in anyways? How do you explain away the people like an old high school friend of mine that was so brand loyal to the concept of a european luxury car that they got the only such model they could afford (purely in cap-ex terms) which was aging and constantly being maintained (could have easily leased a late model asian economy car instead, with money to spare) and from which all of the subjective experience features were gone (sounded awful, felt awful, smelled awful, and had little remaining intact interior materials)? Also, there are cars that manage to have both terrible TCO and lack any positive subjective experience features but manage to make it onto the roadways regardless. There should be an elastic luxury portion of the market where you have the typical dealership experience -- but it should be a tiny minority. The rest of the market should be very concrete, where you show up and just pay a simple price for a simple commodity vehicle that competes with the others through simple metrics (fuel economy, cargo capacity, crash test performance, power-to-weight ratio, warranty terms, etc.) I get an independent party's TCO estimator where I can fill in my average miles per year, how often and how much I might haul, number of years I plan to own it before selling, etc. and they use past data to project costs of ownership (down to considering things like "this model engine has been in use for many years so we can be very confident about its cost of maintanance) to get a TCO for all the models in this segment to easily consider before ordering, and no grubby salesmen are required -- it's mostly between me and the engineers that conspire to build a reliable machine -- no executives to decide that the model line needs to be segmented in such and such a way to trick me into paying more to get much less with by putting a single economy feature (like durable LED headlamps) in the top of the line model with a bunch of other things I really would rather not have (wood texture details and crap).