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Originally Posted by rvoll
No condescension here. I'm a car nut and have owned lots of cars and done lots of things to them. I'm just saying that the vast majority of people who buy ANY car want some creature comforts like power steering, comfortable seats, electric windows, air conditioning, a radio, bluetooth for phone, etc. These are things I removed for my track cars, but for my daily driver, I wouldn't buy a car without them. Other than that, what do your strip out of the BRZ? Tires? Wheels? There is not enough other stuff to make any real difference in price. And there is not enough volume to have significantly different models other that what they have. What you're saying just doesn't make any real world sense.
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that stuff is basic. I'd rather have more of those features, not less. What I'm talking about is the 86 only stuff that is probably more costly. We know the 86 has bigger brakes and wheels in the USA, but not overseas. That adds useless cost. The seats are different which is also silly. The steering wheel is different and things like that.
They can easily keep the current cars as is, and add in a lower cost version below it that removes the unique items and adds in as many part bin pieces from the higher volume selling Impreza. A lot of people wouldn't miss the fancy wheels, suspension, or BRZ only items in the interior. I hope the next gen if it is real uses the same chassis as the other cars too, as that will lower cost as well.
In my opinion the biggest problem the 86 has is price. When they were first developing it one of the big things was the cost was suppose to be $20k or less, and then the Japanese Yen went nuts and that was thrown out the window. A 200 hp car is not as big a deal at $20k than it is at $26k.
Quote:
Originally Posted by NCtoBRZ
Even replacing parts, there just isn’t the nearly $6k worth of savings needed to bring it to this magical $20k mark. The RWD layout and differences in the chassis and sheet metal account for a lot of the price difference over an Impreza. The interior is not any nicer (except the alcantara seats in the Limited trim) in the twins than an Impreza and the factory stereo in the twins is already garbage. For the smaller niche within what is already a niche market that would be satisfied with the 152 hp Impreza engine, I don’t think it would be worth the manufacturers time for the assembly line changes that would be need to install all of the alternative parts. Call it a glorified Impreza engine if you like, but it makes 53 more horsepower than in the Impreza... and too many people already complain about the 200-205 horsepower that the twins make now. We are all entitled to our opinions, but I just don’t think that swapping a few parts out for Impreza parts would lower the price enough or increase sales enough to matter when Toyota/Subaru never expected these cars to sale in mass volumes to begin with.
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That of course is the question. Only Subaru can answer that. 200 hp at $20k is better than 200 hp at $26k. And the interiors are similar, but not the same. The more exact same pieces that can be used the less expensive it can be.