Are you married to the auto industry or something?
No.
You just seem to have an incredibly simplistic idea of how things work, and I'm pointing out that you don't know what the eff you're talking about.
I must be simply overestimating the decreased costs of only using a limited set of parts instead of an expansive variety of parts. And at least part of the increased pricing of automatic this vs manual that is more than the actual increased cost of making it. It's the convenience, no? If every car I make uses the same parts, I can certainly acquire them in larger quantities, driving the price down.
Yes, you absolutely are overestimating the decreased costs of only using a limited set of parts.
Car companies ALREADY try to share as many parts between models as they can, because that does help costs. A car "platform", i.e. chassis, is often shared between multiple models and multiple makes, both within a company (i.e. Ford/Lincoln) and across companies (i.e. Ford/Mazda have shared platforms in the past--not sure if they still do).
However as you've probably figured out from printing your game, it's not like there's a linear relationship between pricing and volume such that if you buy enough volume, the price approaches zero... No, the higher the volume, the closer the price approaches production cost. If I need a profit of $X to justify doing business, I can sell 10 units at cost+X/10 or I can sell 100 units at cost+X/100...
None of this matters anyway, because it'll never happen. You guys seem to get really bent over my "why nots" and "what ifs".
I don't know how many classes of passenger vehicle there are.....let's say 10. Is it really so horrific to suggest maybe we only need 6? That those 6 would cost less than they do now, as 6 of the ten? That's evil?
There are 330M people in the US, and I'll throw out a number that say 200M of them are of driving age. Those 200M buy about 17M new automobiles per year. When you look at the incomes, preferences, family size, vehicle usage patterns, etc of 17M cars sold per year, it gives you a TON of variability.
The automakers produce what they can sell. You know how you know that? They stop producing things that don't sell well enough, like my beloved Ford Flex which is not being carried forward post-2019. BTW the main reason this died was that it was
sharing a platform with a class of Lincoln vehicles, and when that vehicle platform was being refreshed it didn't make sense to redesign the Flex for a new platform because it didn't sell well.
This is the point at which the market is self-correcting. If automakers produce too many classes of vehicles, then certain classes will have difficulty selling, and be discontinued. That's how it works.
You don't think there are 10 classes so that you can have one in mind just to be upsold to the next one, extracting X-number of dollars from you? You don't think the auto industry is bloated? Ask them yourself, as Ford said they're just eliminating all non-Mustang cars. I guess one of their VPs reads this forum, huh?
Ford responded to market demand--the market wants a lot more CUVs and a lot fewer sedans. They now have 7 different CUVs/SUVs:
- Ecosport (launched in North America in 2018)
- Escape
- Bronco (2dr and 4dr) (launched in 2021)
- Edge
- Explorer
- Excursion
- Mustang Mach-E (launched in 2021)
So they got rid of most sedans domestically to make room for the Ecosport which has been available internationally but was brought into the US, and for the new Bronco and Mach-E.
