370Z on Concave from 360 Forged

shabarivas

A wheel is a wheel... just because you have a GTR /z06 / lambo - you should not HAVE to spend that kinda money... its just insane. I agree that most ppl who have those cars COULD afford the wheels but thats different...

Togo

I don't necessarily agree with the concept of paying more for your parts because the car they go on is more but thats life....

FuszNissan

Danny...I think you scared him off

__________________
Mods: Too Many to list!
LouFuszNissan
ZDAYZ 2012

Zerafian

Multi and mesh are ridiculous...I love them..sadly 1 rim cost as much as my volks and tires almost LOL...I Suppose If I had a 370 and some money I would save for those in 20" as my first mod.

__________________

LC500 exhaust set uphttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bI7DiA43ZYw&t

TRD0524

I would spend my money elsewhere.

When was the last time you saw a set of these wheels on a racecar?

Togo

armensti

what are you guys talking about? 8 gz for rims is not that expensive. i mean the rims are build for a 29k car but it doesnt mean that we shouldnt pay 30% of the cars price to get a nice set of rims. lmaooooooooooo is this guy serious????? 2k per rirm? and i bet you guys anything that the rims are going to weight more then a pair of volks or even the stock sp rims we got.

if your going to charge 8k for rims here is a small list of things that they should come with

3lb a piece so thats 12 all together
the rim must be dirt proof
scratch proof
it must have a anti curb technology inside it
anti theft
must come with a 24/7/365 security guard with a gun license
and last but not least it has to have a pssy magnet that guarantees at least 5 chicks a day

if it has all the things stated above i would be more then happy to write you a check for 8k

BUT if it doesnt have any of the things posted above then would anyone and i mean anyone plz tell me why their worth 8k?



do this companies think at all? honestly wtf is going on here? this is not a FERRARI. just cuz its the most bang for the buck doesnt mean that we should get screwed by the mods that go on the car. i mean cmon are you serious? charging 30% of the cars price just for rims? who does thinking for your company? do you guys just put numbers on pieces of paper and toss it in a hat and what ever comes out you go with that? are you guys in bankruptcy and trying to find ways to make quick money?

Ill give you a little hint charging 8k for rims on a 29k car is not the right way.

OMGWTFBBQ

What I don't get is why wheels for Ferraris and exotic cars cost so much more than wheels for say, a 370z, or even a Honda Civic.

Is there THAT much more R&D that goes into making a wheel for a $200k car compared to a $20k car? Or are companies just out there to make a quick buck by targeting a more elite niche? Maybe I'm missing something here..

__________________
Zele Performance | Varis | Powerhouse Amuse | Craftsquare | Tommy Kaira | Top Secret | HKS | Defi | Volk Racing | Cusco | SPL | Never ending build thread.. PM me if you have rare JDM parts for sale!

armensti

ur not missing anything its just a get rich quick skim which does not work. there is nothing extra that goes on expensive rims. just the material sometimes but its still over priced.

dyezak

Well, fitments for exotics are unique. You aren't going to get a set of wheels that fits a Lambo or Ferrari with a common bolt hole diameter, hub diameter, and offset. Take the Ferrari Enzo, it uses spindle mount wheels...only F1 and LeMans cars use those in any apreciable quantity. Porsche wheels however are a little more common, I believe they share bolt hole and hub diameter sizes with Audi and VW.

So if you are designing wheels for a Ferrari or a Lambo then you know right off the bat that your market is a very very small place. We will use Ferrari by itself to keep things simple, and compare it to the Honda Civic:

In 2008 only 6500 Ferrari's (ALL ferrari's, of which there are multiple different wheel fitments) were sold to the general public.

In 2008 roughly 400,000 Civic's were sold.

I found a statistic (true or not, but seems fair) that only 6% of the population modify their cars. So if we use a blanket 10% in our calculations we should be safe.

That gives us (the hypotheical wheel manufacturer) a possible 650 Ferrari's that would buy custom wheels, and 40,000 Civic's that will buy custom wheels. All the Civic's have the same fitting requirements (they all have the same bolt hole diameters, hub diameters and offset requirements). The 650 Ferrari's are split among 2 different fitments. So if we choose one car that takes us down to 375 cars.

Now we have to think, how much of the market can we capture. We know that not every single Ferrari owner is going to buy *our* wheels, we have competitors and some of the Ferrari owners are going to go with them. Let's say we are the best...so we get 50% of the market. That means we could capture 20,000 Civic's or 188 Ferrari's.

Now, do the different wheels actually cost more to develop? Nope. Same designers working for us putting in roughly the same ammount of time. But we get to spread the cost of re-couping that investment among 20,000 people for our new Civic wheel, and we have to re-coup that same investment from only 188 people who drive the Ferrari.

Now that they are developed they have to be made. If we are talking cast or forged we have to make molds. Again, that mold cost can be re-couped among 20,000 Civic owners but only 188 Ferrari owners. If you want to talk CNC then the CNC machine cost would be substituted for the mold cost.

Material cost will be the same.

So lets say we spent $250,000 in labor (engineer's aren't cheap) developing our new high tech wheel. And another $100,000 in manufacturering setup (molds or CNC machine). We have to re-coup $350,000.

But wait, the Civic uses 4 of the same wheels in most cases, where the Ferrari is going to need different front and rear wheels. So double the Ferrari development and manufacturering costs to $700,000.

Assuming it actually costs us $200/rim in materials (we are using some really high end stuff here right?), that's our base cost.

So, Civic = $350,000/20,000 = $17.5 per purchaser needs to be re-couped
That means we will need to re-coup $4.38 of our development cost per wheel. That means our civic wheel will cost $204.38 to produce.

So Ferrari = 350,000*2/188 = $3723.40 per purchaser that needs to be recouped or $930.85 per wheel. That puts our Ferrari wheels at $1130.85 right off the bat to produce.

Now go add in distribution, shipping, advertisement, warantee buffer, that have to be added up and distributed in the same mannor. You can see that even if we spend $500,000 for these services, the Civic's cost will only go up by about $6.25 where the Ferrari will go up $644.89.

Bam, we have a $1800 Ferrari wheel and a $210 Civic wheel. Now we are a business so we need profit to keep moving forward. So factor in 25% profit and that takes us up to $2250 for the Ferrari and $262 for the Civic.

This is assuming that we are the best wheel company that has ever walked the face of the earth and we are able to capture 50% of the market, if you adjust these figures to a more resonable market capture rate (12%) then the numbers fall in line.

shabarivas

Rims will cost a lot... weds dry carbon wheels are about 14k for a set - but they also weigh in at 6lbs per wheel

dyezak

I just wanted to add that my post (even though it's crazy long) was very elementary and only an approximation. And it didn't account for amoritization of costs for the Civic wheel among other cars that have the same fitment thereby lowering the cost of the wheel even more. It didn't account for actual production costs (hey, even Chineese sweat shops pay their workers).

If you want you can run the same numbers for a 350z/370z as there are about 35,000 Z's sold on average each year since 2004 (2003 only had like 9,000 because it was the first year run).

tstrick9

If they sell some rims maybe that guy could take some english lessons.

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?

__________________
Zele Performance | Varis | Powerhouse Amuse | Craftsquare | Tommy Kaira | Top Secret | HKS | Defi | Volk Racing | Cusco | SPL | Never ending build thread.. PM me if you have rare JDM parts for sale!

dyezak

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.