TorTorden wrote:eAnyhoo I am also tempted to get the CV1 as well. Probably shouldn't have canceled it but having one let slone both is qiute ludicrous amount of money to spend on something that is basically a toy. Then again I am coming up on that age where a small mid life crisis is just expected, and it is cheaper than a motorcycle or a two seater sportscar..
Being one of the few, virtually debt-free Americans (I even own my house outright, no mortgage), I've long learned to not give into my passions with dollars. I even went back'n forth on the GTX 980Ti and Oculus Rift purchase, until I gave myself credit for not buying a new notebook for 5-6 years, and sticking with old, US$300 used Dell Precision m4600 products. So, with that said ...
Being a 2-seat coupe lover, I just cannot let this go ...
[Off-topic] Depends on where you live, and what you want.
Here in the US, if you want a small, nimble, 2-seat coupe, the demand is much higher than supply. The domestic manufacturing, even of import brands, has decided it's not worth the investment and lower profit margins. And then there is the stigma.
There is a male attitude small, nimble, 2-seat coupes are unmainly, among the sports car ignorant ... which is utterly heavy in the US where most Americans only know Formula 1 (and "Formula 1 lite," IndyCar) and NASCAR. Sure, they love it when ALMS/USCC comes to down with IndyCar, and end up enjoying it more, but that's because of the exotic imports are usually involved.
But Americans, aggregately, are still wholly ignorant of the SCCA, and the class of small, nimble, 2-seat coupes -- what we often call roadsters -- and because they aren't manufactured in quantity, they are artificially costly in the US ... even used. Only the underpowered Mazda Miata/MX-5 is affordable, a great roadster handling-wise, but easily outclassed -- part of the reasons. Also being "the chic" stigma on power. Used Pontiac/Saturn Solstice/Sky, even the non-Turbo versions are over-priced, and because of blind American belief that Honda is always reliable, even the Honda S2000 -- used, in poor condition -- costs 2x what it does in Britain, of better quality.
So the US is basically an import consumer of small, 2-seat, sport coupes. People paying >>US$50K for them from overseas, with costly, domestic repair prices.
Then you have the opposite in full size, luxury, >>1G lateral sports cars in the US. You can have Porsche owners and writers laud it, and even Top Gear UK laud it, but most Americans under 50 refuse to buy a US$50K Corvette, despite the hot laps, handling (even reduction in top speed from the prior generation in favor of on-body downforce, even without wings, which GM refuses to sell for liability reasons), quantum leap in improvement of the interior (to the point most <US$100K Porsche owners admit it is plastic in comparison to the latest Corvettes, and one has to spend >US$100K to get as good in a Porsche), and that means they are often $5-10K below list.
Total cost of ownership is cheap compared to anything -- "Repair costs of a Cobalt, 1/10th anything else" as Jay Leno used to say" -- but the stigma of the "old man's car" sticks. It's so bad that it's the Corvette, with full comprehensive, is the cheapest car to insure in the US, period, of any car, of any category, period. Even track insurance is dirt cheap for it because of its handling and stability.
Trust me, there's not a time when I don't mention to Tadge (Corvette Chief Engineer) that they really need to introduce a smaller roadster with a smaller V8 pushrod. The low-RPM torque in GM's 5th Gen pushrod would make it the ultimate drift car, and get the younger generation interested in Corvettes again, let alone would become a popular seller for SCCA clubs. But it's really beyond him, and GM, the bean counters and other things.
As he told me once, their focus studies literally caused older people to say, "That's not a Corvette, I wouldn't buy it" while the kids go, "I would never buy a Corvette, not even if they had a 2-seat roadster that out-performed and out-drifted anything." Kinda the world the US consumer is.
Especially when the younger generation is so obsessed with exclusivity and snobbery, 1-up'ing each other, instead of inclusivity and sharing.
Case-in-point: Even Porsche owners feel it too, here in the US. Their average owner age is within a decade of Corvette owners, and like Corvette owners, they are looked down upon as "too inclusive," waiving to each other on the road, having picnics and tailgates where "everyone else has one." Actual performance and comeradery is now secondary to assumptions of performance and stand-off'ish exclusivity.
And that totally explains why sports car racing is slowly dying here in the US too. Americans eithee want the Formula 1 experience, for the aforementiondd, or are part of thr trailer institution of NASCAR ovals (even though NASCAR has non-ovals too, just not remotely popular).
My wife had given me full approval to buy a new, US$100K Corvette Z06. But I'd rather keep saving for retirement, and diversifying into more land, and more remote land ... especially if things really go to crap and the US dollar becomes worthless like a lot of us yesteryear, "stay our of our lives, men and women know better for people than the gov't, stay out of our pocketbooks, Americans help one another better than the gov't," American Libertarians believe is not a matter of "if," but "when." Heck, right now the US Fed is far, far more exposed to thr EU and the Euro, than the UK, but you wouldn't know it from any media.
Florida, even though in the top 10 states, sending far more in taxes to the federal that it receives despite all the retirees (it's actually more young people now) and the space programs, is still too heavily dependent on tourism. Texas, on the other hand, could be it's own country.
[/offtopic]
Disclaimer: Please excuse any grammar, pathetic typos, or satanic versus known as "auto-correct" as this was posted via Tapatalk from my budget Honor 5X