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Originally Posted by Rogue Leader
That weight is actually very impressive in this day and age because it has a large engine, luxury items like navigation and other electronics, sound deadening, heated power seats, etc, and they have all the "safety" features of any other Lexus included, such as knee and seatbelt airbags and stuff.
Some things that make the Lotus Elise and Exige so light is that barely the size of a Mini Cooper, they have little 4 cylinder engines, no power steering, race seats, no radio, and safety wise they have the federal minimum which is just driver and passenger airbags. And even with that they still weigh around 2k lbs.
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Keep in mind, the ZR1 Corvette comes in at 3,250. A Z06 is around 3,100. So a sub 3,000 pound Corvette is possible.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SleepWarz
I'd like to see it sub 2800 pounds. Then I'd be impressed.
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Again, if you don't want a radio, or airbags or windows that roll down you could probably get there in a car this size. But again, going back to the Corvette - lots of premium materials, aluminum, carbon fiber and yes even a little bit of balsa wood are required. And "premium" comes with a big price tag. And not many people want to pay 300,000 for a car without safety or modern conveniences.
And as far as the price vs. volume, it's simple economics. If you price it a million, you might sell 100 of them. Look at the Veyron. Well over a million and the volumes are very low. If you priced it at $100,000 you might sell 1,500.
And also, Ferrari doesn't sell as many as they can. They tool up and set up a manufacturing plan that results in X number of cars. You have to tell your suppliers how many parts you want and they contract to build that number at a fixed price. Can you up that? Yes, but in most cases it means buying another tool set as the original tool set was set up to only produce X parts. That also gets crazy expensive. And if you are hand building cars on a single and very short assembly plant, you can't just up the line rate without adding automation which makes the car no longer "hand made". Low volume is planned for just as much as high volume.