RE: CC Cyclone: Spotted
Discussion
Article suggests each of the fibreglass panels was £2k to produce. If that price was the same when this car was built, that is, adjusted for inflation, £50k in panels alone today, before thinking about chassis, brakes, suspension, motor, drivetrain, interior. You'd have to like it an awful lot, given what else that money can get you!
fblm said:
No way. 4k tops.
I think that - since they're referring to the 'prototype car' - they're talking about the cost of making the actual moulds as well as the prototype's bodywork taken from them... in which case, taking into account how labour intensive it was back then, £2K per mould+panel is just about conceivable, if you factor in the labour costs.These days, we've got 3-axis CNC routers that can mill a buck from a solid block, but even then the cost of a buck for a whole body is circa £15-£20K, which then needs hand finishing and individual moulds taking off it for each panel.
The point they were making is that when you've spent that much money on creating body moulds, it's crucial to amortise the costs over a number of production cars as quickly as possible - which is where many would-be kit car manufacturers go wrong. Even for a very simple kit car design, it's easy to spend £100K on design, fabrication and development of a prototype, and then find that the sales don't materialise fast enough to pay for it.
Especially back in the '80s and '90's, it's astonishing how many kit cars were developed and brought to the market, only to sell in numbers that you could count on the fingers of one hand.
Equus said:
fblm said:
No way. 4k tops.
I think that - since they're referring to the 'prototype car' - they're talking about the cost of making the actual moulds as well as the prototype's bodywork taken from them... in which case, taking into account how labour intensive it was back then, £2K per mould+panel is just about conceivable, if you factor in the labour costs.These days, we've got 3-axis CNC routers that can mill a buck from a solid block, but even then the cost of a buck for a whole body is circa £15-£20K, which then needs hand finishing and individual moulds taking off it for each panel.
The point they were making is that when you've spent that much money on creating body moulds, it's crucial to amortise the costs over a number of production cars as quickly as possible - which is where many would-be kit car manufacturers go wrong. Even for a very simple kit car design, it's easy to spend £100K on design, fabrication and development of a prototype, and then find that the sales don't materialise fast enough to pay for it.
Especially back in the '80s and '90's, it's astonishing how many kit cars were developed and brought to the market, only to sell in numbers that you could count on the fingers of one hand.
anonymous said:
[redacted]
Pretty much my thoughts. I like a quirky kit car and there are some truly lovely originals out there (Phantom Vortex/GTR, the Nova, the GTM Libra, or even “retro” efforts like the Kougar Monza), but this is horrendous. Kind of like the old Dax Kamala - it didn’t matter how good the roadtests were, you would never sink £20k into building one because you’d never want to be seen driving it.Gassing Station | General Gassing | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff