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> I bet you could cut about 25% of the price off by removing goofy crap you don't need. Most of those things are low cost, high margin extras. Removing them wo
by doix 2y ago
> I bet you could cut about 25% of the price off by removing goofy crap you don't need.
Most of those things are low cost, high margin extras. Removing them wouldn't really decrease the cost of the car for the manufacturer. A lot of the time, if you don't pay for the extra's, they are included in the car anyway because it's not worth the effort of customizing the build. They are just disabled in software.
- HeyLaughingBoy 2y agoThis is something that people without a manufacturing background often don't appreciate. Modern production lines are so efficient that it's frequently more cost effective to build all units of a product with the same hardware but disable some features in software. I first came across this 20+ years ago working for an office equipment manufacturer. We had to add code for the service people to enable a feature in the machine that was already present (and pretty expensive to build), but not turned on until the customer paid for it. I remember at the time asking if it wouldn't piss customers off to know that they were paying for something that was already installed, but it didn't seem to faze the Marketing people in the least. Then again, the buyer was someone in a corporate office who would probably never actually see the machine anyway.
- shiroiushi 2y agoYeah, this kind of thing will really piss off individual consumers, but corporate buyers have an entirely different mindset. Corporate customers frequently lease stuff anyway, rather than buying it, because of the way that this affects taxation.
- ted_bunny 2y agoI meant, if a modern line of cars were made without the bells and whistles in the first place.