Quote:
Originally Posted by ZionsWrath
I am no businessman so correct me if I am wrong. There is a certain market for "specialized/sports/niche" vehicles. I feel certain the educated people developing this car understood that. The miata is the most affordable, RWD, sports care available. Disregarding that, it was a known fact prototypes of our car were routinely seen bench-marking against caymans.
hmmm.....
I don't think the engineers and businessman are stupid. I think they knew if they could produce a vehicle with as close as possible Porsche handling AND near miata price point and power, they would had an EASY success.
Seems like they have achieved that, what do you think?
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I think were talking about two different definitions for success. From a product standpoint, I completely agree that it was a success. In fact, to develop a rather practical, RWD coupe with a price point around $25k is an extremely monumental task. However, what I'm discussing, and what the article is referring to, is financial success. One does not always translate to the other. It sounds like despite selling "well" in numbers, the overall profit to cost of each car is not high enough for the amount they've sold to recoup all of the investment they put into it.
Think about it this way, why does Toyota set sells expectations about 3x that of Subaru? Because Toyota essentially bankrolled the entire project, from conception to R&D to production development. They also have a far larger logistics cost to rebrand their cars from the factory and because of additional import/export costs as they utilize Subaru for actual production. In contrast, Subaru essentially only has manufacturing to consider, and since they already available factories, labor, and parts, it costs them a fraction of what Toyota had to invest in developing this vehicle. Thus, Toyota is forced to sell a significantly more vehicles to recoup that cost. In addition, to satisfy their stakeholders, they need to prove that the car is profitable enough that they can use that profit to further invest in R&D for future sports cars (i.e. FT-1). This is how sells expectations are set. It doesn't matter how many vehicles they sell in comparison to their competitors if they can't hit their own expectations to make up all the money they've "lost" in getting their car to market.