Quote:
Originally Posted by OMGWTFBBQ
Whoops. I picked a bad car to compare a Civic to. I meant something like, why are Z wheels so much more expensive than Civic wheels? What was going through my head was the idea that wheel manufacturers, say, think that a Civic owner would spend $2000 on a set of Volks for their $20k Civic. That is approximately 10% of their vehicle cost. Therefore, I assume the wheel manufacturers would guesstimate that they should price their 370z wheels for $3000 (10% of a Z's cost). Is there a legitimate reason for this price difference other than markup? I mean, everyone can clearly see there is a price difference. Where does this come from?
|
Yes, it was an extreme compairison
. However if you take Ferrari and throw them out the window (wait tell me which window so I can go get one for free
) and use the 370z/350z as a compairison you can quickly get to the same conclusion:
350z/370z production is at 35,000/y for the past 5 years. Which means we have about 175,000 Z's on the road in our pool. At our 10% number of potential people who will modify their cars we are talking 17,000 Z's that will potentially purchase a set of wheels. Of those how many are going to purchase high end wheels and how many are going to go with mass produced Enki's or Konig's? I'd say about 25%, so we turn our focus to roughly 4,000 Z's. Out of those how many are looking for "Bling Bling $$" wheels opposed to "Race Oriented" wheels? I'd say half. Now we are looking at 2,000 Z's to sell our wheels to.
Now is where we think, "Hmm, how much of that market share can I get with my wheel?". Truely about 12-16% if you have a really top notch design. Let it be personal preference, intended use, brand loyalty, etc, there are a lot of reason's people may or may not go with your wheel.
BUT, one of the Z's saving graces is that it uses a fairly common bolt pattern and hub size, so you can add more potential customers into your pool, but it won't seep over that much (does the Supra share wheel fitments with the Z?).
Really it's just economy of scale and the fact that the Z really is a small section of a small market compaired to the Civic which is a very large section of a small market (400,000 Civic's produced a year is a lot). Think about it this way. Last figure I heard for the aftermarket car accessory market put this market section at a $1-1.5bil/y business. And that's not just wheels, that includes everything manufacturered for a car by a company that wasn't providing that part as a direct OEM replacement (fuzzy dice fall into this same market as $4,000/ea Fiske wheels).
Compaire that to Cigarettes, or Healthcare, or Housing Development (construction). Hell, I know people in the construction business that would laugh at the type of money that is to be made in the automotive aftermarket... Their companies make more in a month than entire companies like Stillen make in a year.