"PS9" (PS9)
11/11/2015 at 12:17 • Filed to: None
2
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"PS9" (PS9)
11/11/2015 at 12:17 • Filed to: None | 2
| 1 |
You are a purveyor of luxury products, and you are facing a problem. Almost no one who ‘buys’ one of your products gets it through a single hard cash transaction. It’s all lease deals and loan arrangements, with most of them jumping away to the newest model upon release.
A majority of the market you sell to by and large won’t tolerate used cars anymore, and because of that, there is always a small but non-trivial glut of used examples sitting on the market. Because demand for them is low relative to new, depreciation for them will be very, very high. A non-trivial amount of people are going to opt for the used car because of this. Your dealer networks will be happy, but you won’t. Used car sales are good for the dealer, but are meaningless to you as a manufacturer, and every used example represents a potential lost sale of a new car. How do you deal with this?
You could just limit production. Demand will stay high if the supply isn’t very great. This strategy works well for supercars, but unless that’s all you make, you can’t employ that everywhere. Even luxury goods makers need volume.
You could just make cars that are better in every single way to their predecessors. Making significant leaps forward every generation is really hard. Most of the time, you’ll be making slow incremental progress towards the ideal. You can’t correct flaws you haven’t made yet. This will happen once and a while, but you can’t do that all of the time.
...No. Actually, that’s a great idea. But we do it in reverse. You don’t put more things in. You find out what things your customers care about and you take them away.
!!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!!
The fastest way to get people to covet something is to tell them they can’t have it anymore, and whatever’s left is all they’re going to get. As the world chews up all the remaining examples, people will become craven. Values will skyrocket to ridiculous proportions, and as a manufacturer of new luxury goods, that’s exactly what you want.
Look at this insanity. How is this thing worth $40k more than a brand new GT3?! Just because one of the last air cooled Porsches? So what! It doesn’t even have a DCT, or satnav, or a warranty. The GT3 is way faster! That’s madness. You wouldn’t do that, right? Pick this over a brand new GT3 you don’t have to worry about at all? Nah. You wouldn’t. Most wouldn’t. And that’s exactly what I want. The hardcore collectors and enthusiasts will drive prices of older products up, depreciation down, and normal people to pick new over used. In fact, this plan works so well, I’m just going to keep doing it.
The GT3 will not come with a manual anymore. Guess you’ll have to settle for last year’s model if you want 3 pedals. Better get them while they’re still relatively affordab- OOPS! Too late!
Man, you sure do love the sound of that N/A Flat six, right? !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!!
Now, understandably, you’re probably all sweating bullets over what other changes we might bring to the 911. I mean...imagine a world where every new 911 suddenly was hybrid. Prices for non-hybrid used 911s...well they’d all basically become unobtainium overnight. You’d have to buy new if you wanted to have a shot at driving one at all. But we’d neeeeeever do something like that right? !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! MWHAHAHAHAHAHA
EL_ULY
> PS9
11/11/2015 at 13:34 |
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we have that issue with our Lotus side. We have the largest inventory in the country and sell maaaaaaybe 1 every 2 months. We have cars from 2012 in our inventory selling as new marked way the hell down. The 2016 Evora 400 is on the way which might sell on their own but sucks for all the regular Evora in stock. We don’t have any used Lotus cars. If this was a stand alone dealer I don’t know how it would stay open.