| Trap63 |
11-21-2020 06:21 PM |
Quote:
Originally Posted by juliog
(Post 3386167)
What's your point? Both the EU and each individual country (France.. ugh!) has pushed purchasing & owning sports cars out of reach for the middle class. It's by design. The average young person can't afford purchasing or maintaining a cheap new car either. Car costs go up while wage growth has been flat for years (decades!).
Toyota and Subaru know the 2022 cars aren't viable in Europe due to taxes and regulations. They're not gonna spend the money to develop a small, bespoke, turbocharged engine to bring down retail price of a super low volume car in Europe. The math doesn't add up. Meanwhile, they won't have any issues selling the car in USA, Japan, Australia and other markets. The Nissan 400Z will be skipping EU altogether as well.
If we're lucky, Toyota will bring the GR 86 regardless, as they have one of the lowest CO2 fleet averages in Europe and can avoid penalties. Subaru's CO2 fleet average is really poor so that's why they can't afford to bring the BRZ over.
Yes, it sucks paying $50K for a car that Americans pay $30K for. Blame the politicians. Buy used instead. Or get another hobby. Those are our options :)
Oh and by the time electric cars are cheaper than ICE.. then governments will start taxing BEVs more heavily based on purchase cost but also on miles traveled. Fuck govs :)
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You're definitely right.
But Sergio Marchionne once said that to exist in an automotive market you have to make numbers, and also many. And he was right. Atlantis teaches...
You can't think of living alone only on American sales numbers. So much so that some American companies have saved themselves in aggregation. If you are a conglomerate you have to make global platforms and produce to sell all over the world. Otherwise the business is not standing. How do you make a small European-cut BMW X1 you also do it of high displacement for Americans but it is not that you stop producing it.
Today in Europe vehicles such as Yaris Gr , Abarth 500, Corsa, Renault Clio, Megane RS, are loved and gain market but real sport coupes aren't sold.
Brz/86 arrived, now there is a risk that to look only overseas you loose the entire European market that at the middle class level cannot pay 66k euros of 718 (Italian base stock price edition).
In the long term, I do not know whether trade policy is really performing. Nissan itself had problems when approached models in this way.
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