"Bob Loblaw Made Me Make a Phoney Phone Call to Edward Rooney" (braddelaparker)
11/24/2014 at 17:21 • Filed to: None
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"Bob Loblaw Made Me Make a Phoney Phone Call to Edward Rooney" (braddelaparker)
11/24/2014 at 17:21 • Filed to: None | 4
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I've been considering purchasing an NSX in the relatively near future, which I've discovered is one of the single most painful vehicles on the planet you can actively shop for. There are a variety of reasons for this, most notably that most of them are now owned (and have been ruined by) 29 year-olds who have just been promoted to manager of the car audio department at their local Best Buy and think that, because they're still living at home and don't pay rent, their $15.75/hour wage can now buy them the world if they cut back on their consumption of Houston-grade pot (the joke is that all Houstonians smoke schwag, and it's both true and depressing).
Today, whilst actively avoiding working while at work, I stumbled across the perfect, completely unquantifiable measure with which to exemplify the NSX market's awfulness: pricing ratios!
While I consider my full-time job to be that of spending 8 to 10 hours a day desperately trying to recapture my childhood, I also spend 8 to 10 hours a day moonlighting as an appraiser of privately held businesses. In short what that means is that moderately to severely to I-don't-have-enough-digits-on-my-person-to-count-the-zeros-in-your-net-worth-ly wealthy people pay me to tell them what their moderately-well to very-poorly run businesses are worth for a variety of purposes, chief among them bickering over money with their wives, business partners, banks, or the IRS.
The relevance of that monotonous paragraph is that one of the ways we in the industry (and finance in general) measure the performance and relative values of these businesses is by using price ratios. You take the price of a company's market capitalization/appraised value and divide it by some kind of financial measure (income, assets, or, in the case of Tesla, non-GAAP Q3 annualized net income adjusted for all of the expenses we have that we don't like and make us look bad) to come up with a price-per-unit of measure. It gives you a quick and simple way to evaluate companies in relative terms instead of in absolutes.
Moving on from yet another monotonous paragraph, today it hit me that I could apply this to cars, specifically the NSX market. Simply put, you take the price of a car (for an NSX that price should generally be approximately double what you paid for it 6 months ago) and divide it by an objective measure you make up on the spot to justify your opinion.
For example, most NSX ads are terrible ; therefore, we can come up with a price to advertisement quality ratio by taking the price of a given NSX and dividing it by an arbitrary figure you assign to make your analysis say what you want it to say (is exactly how I do it at work, too). A low multiple here is your goal in that you want to pay the least amount of money for the best presented car.
Take for example !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!!
The example above has all of the hallmarks of a bad car ad, albeit all in a relatively mild form:
Only 5 pictures which show you: the car in a half-washed out forested area, the seats and rear bulkhead, the frunk, and one wheel. To the seller's credit, the second picture does do the highly important job of displaying the open-ability of all hinged apparatuses
Caps lock is broken and stuck in the "on" position
Lists extensive modifications and implies that they're value additive
Includes a separate set of black wheels for additional $$$
On my rating scale of 1-10, I give this ad a 4. That may seem generous, but we have to keep in mind that this is a relative scale which must include space for craigslist ads which include no pictures and simply say "civic for sale, aftrmkt mods, runs good, 3".
From there it's simply a matter of taking the asking price in thousands (i.e. $50,000 becomes 50.0) and dividing it by the ad rating of 4. Unfortunately there are two prices asked in the ad of $54,995 and $49,989. That's okay, though, as any good financial analyst will tell you that point estimates are yucky and ranges are more better.
Anyway, doing some simple math, that brings us to a price to ad quality ratio of somewhere around 12.50 – 13.75. This is exceptionally bad, as even an average classified ad on VWVortex manages a ratio of 10 or so, and this is by far not the worst NSX ad I've found in recent weeks. While the ad isn't horrific, the stratospheric asking price really hampers this NSX's performance.
We don't have to stop at the price to ad quality ratio. The NSX market also ranks very poorly on the price of car to terribleness of its aftermarket wheels ratio (for the car above that's about a 15 given a wheel quality of 3.5), the price to your confidence on a scale from 1-10 that the car doesn't have a salvage title ratio (let's face it, every NSX has a salvage title), and the price to how many minutes you could spend in the same room as the current owner ratio (VWVortex really struggles with this one).
Have a favorite ratio that you just made up to justify your snobbish hate of a certain car? Share it in the comments so I can hate it with you.
n54 & s38
> Bob Loblaw Made Me Make a Phoney Phone Call to Edward Rooney
11/24/2014 at 17:37 |
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blows my mind how poorly written many used car ads are, particularly when it's an enthusiast-oriented vehicle. One of the main reasons that I ended up buying my M5 was the quality of the ad and the level of detail that the seller put into writing it.
I look at the ad as an indicator of the owner and a barometer of how well the car has been maintained. If its poorly written, lacking detail and photos and every other word is mispelled, it makes me wonder how well they've taken care of it.
Funktheduck
> Bob Loblaw Made Me Make a Phoney Phone Call to Edward Rooney
11/24/2014 at 17:49 |
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There's always the truck lift to penis size ratio.
I've calculated it as such:
For every inch above stock ride height it removes a quarter inch of penis. Once you get above 6 inches of lift beyond stock ride height that ratio goes to a half inch removed per inch of lift.
The average American make has an erect penis size of 5.5". So for the guy who was blocking traffic in his 80s pick up that was so high the front bumper was at my roof line, I would imagine his penis is inside his body like a faux vagina.
Or at least that's what the internet tells me. And what every girl I know assumes about guys with bro trucks.
CounterTorqueSteer
> n54 & s38
11/24/2014 at 17:51 |
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I purchased a used mustang that was a bit more expensive with higher mileage soley because the ad was free of caps lock and grammatical errors. It shows that the owner isn't a bozo.
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Bob Loblaw Made Me Make a Phoney Phone Call to Edward Rooney
> Funktheduck
11/24/2014 at 18:06 |
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Nailed it.
E92M3
> Bob Loblaw Made Me Make a Phoney Phone Call to Edward Rooney
11/24/2014 at 19:03 |
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Perhaps you're looking in the wrong place. With Craigslist you are lucky if there's more than 1 picture, and that they weren't taken at night.
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Bob Loblaw Made Me Make a Phoney Phone Call to Edward Rooney
> E92M3
11/25/2014 at 01:06 |
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Craigslist is absolutely a horrible place to look for cars, but any NSX on a proper listing on a proper site has a 20% premium attached to its asking price. Honestly, with prices the way they have gone the last year or two in the NSX market, it's starting to make more sense to buy a car with flaws than it does to buy a well-presented car. The asking premiums for good cars are way outpacing the costs to bring a flawed/higher mileage car into adequate spec.
I am specifically looking for a driver-quality car, which is a bit nichey for NSXs, to be fair. Most of the NSX market falls under low mileage "mint" (skeptical quotation marks), heavily modified, or clapped out; the well used but reasonably maintained section of the market is tiny .