| Tuesday, May 11, 2010 |
07:10 - What a deal
http://jalopnik.com/5534842/why-the-bugatti-veyron-costs-17-million-feature-rte
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This Jalopnik article (via JMH) purports to explain, in pictures, why it is that the Bugatti Veyron costs $1.7 million (and is famously alleged to lose money on the deal).
Great photos, to be sure; and I'm glad to see there are some genuinely innovative features like an iPaq to interface with the onboard data logger and ODBII and nav system. (An iPaq? really?)
But the further you dig into the parts list, the harder it is to escape the conclusion that if there were no such thing as brand markup or conspicuous-consumption dynamics, it's pretty much physically impossible to put $1.7 million of actual parts into a car. Not unless you build it out of solid platinum or something.
I mean, yeah those wheels are nice. But not $120K nice. They're wheels.
Plus this isn't the fastest you can make a street-legal car go, not by a long shot. I've seen things, I've seen them with my eyes...
I'm not saying they should charge less for it or anything. That's dumb, as dumb as pricing all goods and services based on the labor it takes to make them. I just find it fascinating how luxury items can take on an economic life of their own, independent of any of the rules that govern the rest of the world.
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Brian Tiemann
