My immediate response to this is “The marquee and a few tenths of a cent worth of trim and options” but Tastes of Chocolate seems to be implying there’s an honest difference in quality between a less expensive car and a more expensive one (presumably well before the point you’re talking about bespoke machinery). Is this actually the case? Is this idea just marketing? Was it true at one point?
The cost of maintenance.
There is a difference in quality.
However, you pay more and more for less and less improvement (diminishing returns). If you graphed it the curve would slope gently for awhile then turn upward quickly. Each incremental improvement costs more than the last.
There is also a cost for…well…cost. Sort of, “This is so expensive and exclusive I am cool because I have one and you do not.” There is money in that too.
Still, really expensive cars are without a doubt better built (better components, better engineering, etc.) than your average car. You just pay waaaaay more for it than the improvements alone would indicate.
Example:
Car goes 150 MPH might cost you $50,000 ($333/mph)
Car goes 200 MPH might cost you $250,000 ($1250/mph)
I know there is more to it than that (better brakes, tires, etc) but still…the differences are dramatic.
ETA: The Bugatti Veyron will set you back $2.6 million. It goes 250+ mph. It is a stunning piece of engineering. Is it $2.595 million better than a Mercedes? No way.
I do not have a site for this other than hearing this while watching an episode of Top Gear. Apparently Mercedes spends an average of one million dollars per day on R&D. I’m not sure how accurate this figure is and what constitutes R&D, since it was said by Jeremy Clarkson, but if the cost of researching your market has anything to do with how much the vehicle costs then maybe that explains why some cars are so expensive.
It used to be that buying an expensive car was like buying a high quality Swiss watch-- you were paying more for higher quality components and a more reliable machine.
An instructive anecdote. A few years ago, I owned a 1980 Mercedes 240D and a buddy of mine owned a 1979 Cadillac El Dorado. Now, the El Dorado was the top of the line at the time-- it had power everything, plush leather seats, a (for the time) high-powered fuel injected 350 V8 and a four-speaker surround sound with a cassette player. My Benz had a slower-than-hell 4-cylinder diesel (I had to take a lot of mountain passes in first gear!), a 2-speaker FM radio, vinyl seats, flimsy carpet and hand crank windows. But my bargain-basement Benz originally cost about 3 grand more than the El Dorado. Back then the difference really was quality-- you’d be lucky if the Caddy wasn’t worn out by 100k miles, whereas the diesel Benz would basically run forever (mine had 300k when I sold it, but you couldn’t tell).
What changed this was the Japanese. In the 80’s, Honda and Toyota especially started selling some cars that were of extremely high quality, but were still economy cars in price and accoutrements. As all the car makers were forced to try to compete with the bar set by the Japanese, the Swiss watch school of luxury faded and all luxury cars had to follow the El Dorado path: bells and whistles. Even now, the only real mechanical difference between a “luxury” car and a regular mid-size car is maybe a bigger engine and sportier suspension. Otherwise it’s just fancier sat-nav, louder stereos and a plusher interior.
My company once spent some time on a small research project with Daimler-Benz, so I spent time with their R&D people and at their site in Germany. I can believe they spend that much, no problem.
yes, there is a meaningful difference even if the markups get higher as the sticker price increases.
cheap car: hard plastic interior trim, cloth seats, stuff like carpet and headliner looks like it’s made from compressed burlap. I drove a Nissan Versa for a week and couldn’t believe what a cheap piece of shit it was.
expensive car: soft-touch interior trim (occasionally leather-wrapped,) leather/Alcantara seats, generally better attention to fit and finish, sometimes details like making the engine bay look nice.
what really shits me is that for some reason, as a car gets more expensive it seems like quality and reliability problems are more forgivable. I don’t get it. BMWs, Benzes, and VWs are by a lot of accounts unreliable and cost a mint to keep running past warranty, but someone who has a Focus will bitch and moan if the car has a single problem before 200,000 miles.
yeah, Top Gear is not the place to gain insight on the auto industry. Clarkson is not an authority on anything other than his own overinflated ego. I’m sure Daimler AG spends that much on R&D but most of the full-line automakers spend that kind of coin on R&D.
Acura has thicker body sheet metal than Honda, and virtually the same components tuned differently in the case of engines, but they are still most of the same parts.
Compare the Chrysler 300 with a Bentley. The Bentley is completely hand crafted of the best materials as far as look and wear go. The cars are very similar in appearance, but not 5 to 8 times the cost difference in making them. But sitting in a Bentley is far more comfortable due to those materials, and it will go faster and use lots more gasoline.
Without the investment in high-end technology that premium brands make, it wouldn’t trickle down to the less expensive brands. Who has to pay for that?
Materials matter. Carbon fiber and stainless steel are more expensive and cost more to deal with (integrate). Steel and aluminum are cheaper, easier to handle, but don’t last as long.
The difference in tires, wheels, exhaust and brakes – made from better, beefier, thicker materials, could easily – easily – tack on 5,000 - 10,000 dollars.
In a lot of cases it’s options. Go look at the price of a fully loaded Taurus SHO versus a stripped-down Taurus. Then compare the SHO to the Lincoln MKS. They’re both luxury cars, they’re both similarly equipped, and they’re getting pretty close in price. Yup, that bread-and-butter Ford – loaded – is a Luxury car. Heck, a run of the mill Ford these days makes my Continental feel archaic.
I dated a man who had a stunning antique Jaguar. The insides were beautiful burled wood veneer. Leather seats. Flower holders. I don’t know how much it cost, I imagine a lot. But the thing was always in the shop, so when we used to actually go anywhere, we’d drive there in my piece o’ crap Chevy with its plastic interior and cracked vinyl seats. That thing lasted many years with an occasional radiator flush or brake replacement. The Jaguar, when it was running…well, let’s say it was a much more exciting drive, not knowing if we’d even GET there.
I’ve often wondered is why expensive cars look have such sleeker, more pleasing shapes. Assuming pressing sheet metal into fenders and doors isn’t significantly more expensive depending on the shape, couldn’t Acura or Ford hire s a few really good designers away from Maserati or BMW and make a car that looks like one of those, even if it doesn’t perform like one?
You can pay a lot of money just for a badge without necessarily seeing much benefit. Also, smaller production runs inflate prices, as development costs need to be recouped. Other differences can be more substantial. Premium models will often have more advanced engines, more complicated suspension systems, more soundproofing, better quality interiors and more gadgets.
Looking at customer survey data and information from warranty firms, there doesn’t seem to be any relationship between price and reliability.
I don’t think that’s true, people are not very tolerant of problems with their cars. BWW, Mercedes and Audi took a bit of a hammering in the customer satisfaction surveys for several years, due to quality issues, although they seem to have improved with their latest models. Skoda tends to beat VW, despite the fact they are basically the same cars with cheaper interiors, but better quality control.
The premium manufactorers typically charge a lot for anything on their options list, I would guess that is part of their business model.
In the older cars, the sleek curves and sexy shapes were often hand formed. The sheet metal, steel or aluminium, was placed over a buck (form) and hammered into the shape. Also see “english wheel” for metal working. This shaping was slow, manual, and expensive. Mass production cars had the body panels stamped out by machine. Still some good work though.
Modern production methods most often use “hydroforming” for the panels. This allows more complex shapes, smoother flows, and is automated; keeping production costs down. In the most expensive cars, there is still a lot of hand work and assembly, more exotic materials, and fewer units to spread the cost over. Carbon fiber curved panels, for example, are mostly laid up by hand similar to the old hand hammering.
Another thing they said on Top Gear is that if you want to know what features your car will have in ten or fifteen years, look at a Mercedes today, as they often pioneer new features. I drive a 2010 Honda Fit that I bought as fully loaded as possible. It has things like side curtain airbags, ABS, electronic stability control, etc. but cost only about $20,000. A few years ago these features were only available on the expensive cars.
Looking at the features on a new $158,000 Mercedes S600 sedan, I see that it includes more advanced airbags, electronic stability control and braking, along with a system to track if the driver is getting drowsy.
And here’s an article about carbon-ceramic brakes, which are lighter, stay cooler and last longer. But the manufacturing cost is so high that they cost $12,500 even on a Mercedes SLS AMG. Eventually, perhaps, I’ll get them on my next car.
It’s a $12k option on a new car because you are getting a credit on the regular brakes that they swap out for the ceramic ones. The replacement cost is closer to $20k. :o Although part of that is just Euro car snobbery. The ceramic brakes on the Corvette ZR1 don’t cost as much.
The problem is that ceramic brakes are useless on a street car - they don’t improve your stopping distance, which is determined more by tires than brakes, and if anything they will perform worse. Brake pad and disc compounds are formulated to work best at certain temperatures. The brakes on an F1 car would be terrible for driving to the store, since they never get heated up to their optimum temperatures as they would on a race car. I’ve never met any women who could even tell the difference between ceramic and regular brakes based on visual inspection, so you are unlikely to impress anyone in front of the strip club. The only place you could possibly use these things would be at the racetrack.
What I’m trying to say is that the brake package on an expensive German car can tell you something about the driver.
Actually, I didn’t say that there was a difference in quality. I said there is a difference in materials and workmanship.
As others have pointed out, buying an expensive car doesn’t mean that it’s going to be cheap to maintain, or that it’s going to run longer, or spend less time in the shop.
Take a cheap car out for a test drive. Most likely, you will hear lots of road noise, the ride will probably be bumpy, the seats don’t go quite where you want them to be, the stereo will be basic, the AC loud, etc.
Now take out an expensive car - The door doesn’t SLAM shut, it kind of quietly thunks into place. The road and wind noise disappears. That railroad crossing that used to rattle your teeth? Now a slight bump. The seats have tons of different options for position. The car stereo has better sound than your home stereo, and because of the road noise reduction, you can hear it.
Can you clarify what you’re getting at here? If the materials and workmanship are different (better), isn’t that, de facto, a difference in quality? Or are you just saying that such a difference in quality won’t necessarily translate into a longer car life?
I will say my humble 02 Cavalier is quite gadget ridden. Many of the switches connect not to what they control, but to the body control module. The simple, cheap little easy to maintain car no longer exists.